In a country as vast as Canada the geographical extent of viable amateur and semi-pro soccer leagues is going to be limited to the distance that can comfortably be travelled in a single round trip by bus or car during the players time away from their regular jobs on weekends. Attempts to form fully professional national soccer leagues within Canada such as the short-lived Canadian Professional Soccer league and the Canadian Soccer League from 1987-1992 have failed due to low spectator interest in what was very low calibre soccer in European pro terms and the high budgets associated with air travel and hotel accomodation on road trips. At the end of the 1992 season the three top franchises in the CSL from Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal defected to a US based league called the American Professional Soccer League (later renamed the A League). The CSL had shrunk to just 6 franchises in its last season as a number of teams from smaller Canadian population centres such as Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, London, Hamilton, Ottawa and Halifax had simply not been able to sustain a viable pro level budget and had fallen by the wayside. In 1997 pro soccer franchises in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal were part of the A League when it formally became the US Division 2 league after the APSL merged with another set of pro soccer leagues called the USISL (since renamed as the United Soccer Leagues) in the aftermath of the launch of Major League Soccer in 1996. Prior to that MLS and the APSL had been competitors for sanctioning as the US Division I soccer league by the United States Soccer Federation and to therefore gain control of the money left over as a legacy for pro soccer in the USA from the profits generated by the 1994 World Cup. In 1998 the Canadian Soccer Association asked the accounting firm KPMG to assess the potential for another attempt at forming a Division 1 national pro soccer league within Canada. In February 2000 KPMG concluded that such a league was "risky and highly speculative" due to the lack of several key components that would be required for it to be successful and that "Without firm financial commitment/guarantee, the financial viability of the league would be in question from Day One". Despite this the CSA decided to try to proceed anyway and nine months later after 156 meetings and 71 pizza dinners involving soccer enthusiasts from various cities from coast to coast it was announced that a new 8 team pro league called the Canadian United Soccer League would be formed based on a blueprint document. This proposal did not meet with universal approval within Canadian soccer but an implimentation group was formed by the CSA to work torwads launching the league by 2003. Many people argued that attempting to return to an east-west format Canadian league format would be a mistake and that Canadian soccer would be better served by slowly adding to the number of teams that compete in the US based United Soccer Leagues since north-south links with a US based league reduces travel costs and inherently provides a league structure with many more stable well-supported franchises since the USA has at least 10 times more large metropolitan population centres than Canada. The fully professional A League currently has franchises in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal (who unfortunately experienced severe financial problems in 2001) with a fourth being added in Calgary in 2002 after spending their first season in the USL's amateur U-23 Premier Development League. There were 2 other Canadian franchises in PDL in 2001; the Thunder Bay Chill and the Okanangan Predators in Kelowna, BC. The Predators will not be returning in 2002 after drawing only 300 fans and struggling on the field during their first season.
In October 2001, it became increasingly clear that the sponsorship money from corporations and top European clubs that would have been required to launch CUSL in 2003 was not in place so the Toronto Lynx withdrew from the CUSL project. They quickly returned to the fold however after it was announced that the CUSL was merging its efforts with a semi-pro league based in Ontario and Quebec called the Canadian Professional Soccer League to form a new organization to run all pro soccer within Canada. According to a plan announced on the CPSL website the 4 A league clubs would have continued to play in the A league forming the first division of Canadian pro soccer, while the CPSL (primarily based in southern Ontario) would have been the second division and was going to expand across the country on a regionalized basis with a third division level also being contemplated. Stronger CPSL teams were to play a "light interlocking schedule" with the A League teams. The CPSL currently is made up of the Ottawa Wizards, Toronto Olympians, Toronto Supra, Montreal Dynamites, St Catherines Roma, Toronto Croatia, Glen Shields Sun Devils, Brampton Hitmen, North York Astros, Durham Flames, York Region Shooters and London City. New franchises in Hamilton and Toronto are being added in 2002. Most CPSL games draw crowds of under 200 paying spectators so only 2 or 3 CPSL franchises with wealthy and ambitious ownership groups have ever had genuinely pro level budgets. The Ottawa Wizards may be stepping up to the A league within the next couple of seasons while another the Montreal Dynamites scaled back their budget during a disappointing first season but new ownership may emerge in 2002. The Toronto Olympians used to be a high budget team with high profile players like Eddy Berdusco earning pro level salaries but after 3 seasons of struggling to attract more than 50 fans they lost their original owner and are moving from Scarborough to Mississagua to link up with a youth club. In early December 2001, a few weeks after the announcement of the supposed merger between the CUSL and CPSL the future direction of Canadian pro soccer was much less clear after what appeared to be back tracking on the part of the A League clubs. The Montreal Impact was saved from bankrupcy and the USL press release that announced this development described the 4 Canadian franchises as "integral to the current and future success of the A-League" with no mention of CUSL. The following week an article appeared in the Globe and Mail announcing that all 4 A League teams had opted out of CUSL. The Toronto Lynx were again being very vocal in their opposition to proceeding with CUSL and were joined this time by the Montreal Impact who had received funding from the Parti Quebecois provincial government to fund at least 5 more years of operation within the A League. Vancouver avoided public comment while Calgary's statements were more ambiguous than those of Montreal and Toronto. A few days later Sepp Blatter paid a visit to meet CSA and government politicians about a potential future World Cup bid. Although Blatter emphasized that the creation of a strong economically viable Canadian pro league would be a prerequisite for a successful World Cup finals hosting bid and the CSA and Canadian government reiterated their support for a national league, by the time the visit was over the head of the CUSL implimentation group, Gerry Gentile, had stepped down and Michael Vandale of the Calgary Storm failed to even mention CUSL in a press release after being appointed to the CSA's board of directors as the pro soccer representative so it is unclear what future the original CUSL blueprint still has now. The one concrete change that might survive all the recent turmoil within Canadian soccer is that an annual Open Cup tournament may be lanched to provide a national champion for possible future participation in the CONCACAF Champions Cup although progress on that appears to be stalled. One proposal that has recently been actively considered involves the 4 A league teams, the CPSL and Pacific Coast Soccer League winners and the reigning national amateur level champion with the first set of finals potentially being held in Calgary in September 2002 while another more longer term proposal would involve considerably more teams from the amateur and semi-pro levels of Canadian soccer as well as the PDL and A league teams participating each year.
All this pro soccer stuff is all very well you might say but what are people supposed to do who live in cities where there is currently no USL franchise if there is to be no new attempt at a domestic Canadian pro league along the lines of the CUSL blueprint or the old CSL? Are we supposed to do without soccer completely? That is a common misconception but there are in fact regional leagues operating from coast to coast many with a reasonably high playing standard. Unfortunately even people who consider themselves hardcore Canadian soccer fans often appear reluctant to pay any attention to this grassroots level of the sport. In many ways however this is the sector of Canadian soccer that is most likely to sustain a viable high profile national championship from coast to coast with the overall winner eventually determined on an end of season single venue tournament basis. There are parallels to this sort of format in other sports. In hockey the fully pro level of the sport is run on a north-south continental basis in the shape of the NHL but junior hockey is organized on a regionalized Canadian basis with the WHL, OHL and QMJHL playoff winners meeting at the end of the season in a single city to determine the national champion in the Memorial Cup. Senior hockey has a similar national championship format with the Allan Cup. A national soccer championship has existed since 1913 which currently involves the 10 provincial cup winners but unfortunately it has a very low media profile. That can and should change in future if all the strongest Canadian soccer clubs at both amateur and semi-professional levels are going to be involved in the proposed new Canadian Open Cup format alongside the USL franchises. There is no reason why this tournament could not over time slowly gain the sort of exposure that the Brier attracts as the annual media focus for the sport of curling within this country. Unfortunately soccer association politics have dictated in the past that only amateur level clubs could be involved in the 10 provincial cups that serve as the qualifiers for the existing national championship tournament although most of the semi-pro teams in the CPSL in Ontario and Quebec attract similar crowds and have similar playing standards to many of the top amateur clubs that do compete. It is unclear at this point the extent to which that would change if and when the new Open Cup is actually implimented. Beyond the problems surrounding the national championship format, Canadian soccer has always lacked a coherent regional league structure. Hopefully the plan for regionalized second and third divisions from coast to coast envisaged at the time of the CUSL/CPSL merger will still proceed with or without the CUSL being formed as a domestic first division national pro league and will turn out eventually to have been the first step on the road to a fully integrated regional league structure in Canada with a pro/rel system in place from the local amateur district level leagues all the way up to semi-pro regional leagues that potentially involve more than one province. Progress may be slow however as a semi-pro regionalized second division was proposed by a CSA Pro Soccer Task force as far back as November 1997 but 5 years later only the CPSL(Ontario) has actually emerged. Part of the problem might be a desire to apply the CPSL(Ontario)'s existing league format and business plan that has been developed for a geographically compact and heavily populated part of the country primarily centred on the GTA to the Prairies and to Quebec combined with the Maritimes where the population is more spread out and travel times would therefore be significantly longer making particpation in semi-pro soccer much less feasible for players with family commitments and full-time jobs outside of soccer.
The primary goal of this website is to help to improve matters within Canadian soccer in some small way by simply giving people an opportunity to learn more about the regional soccer leagues that are already in existence from coast to coast by providing a set of links to the leagues that have set up websites with regularly updated results and standings. Websites for provincial and territorial soccer associations are included in the parts of the country where leagues have not been able to do this yet.
National Championship |
||
|---|---|---|
|
Saskatoon 2000 |
List of former champions |
|
Alberta |
||
|---|---|---|
|
Alberta Major Soccer League Calgary United Soccer Association |
Edmonton and District Soccer Association Lethbridge Soccer Association |
|
Saskatchewan & Manitoba |
Prairie Super League (Saskatchewan) Saskatoon District Soccer Association |
Regina District Soccer Association Manitoba Soccer Association Manitoba Major Soccer League |
|---|
Atlantic Provinces |
||
|---|---|---|
|
Soccer New Brunswick Fredericton Senior Soccer League Baie de Chaleur Soccer League |
PEI Soccer Association Nova Scotia Soccer League Newfoundland Soccer Association |
|
Territories |
||
|---|---|---|
|
Northwest Territories Soccer Association |
Yukon Soccer Association |
|
