Canada is approaching the World Cup: the secrets of the ice hockey country where soccer is now all the rage

In Canada, ice hockey was always the most popular, but in recent years, soccer has been replacing it and if the women’s team is the current Olympic champion, the men’s is getting closer to playing its second World Cup and leads the final Hex of the Concacaf ahead of the United States and Mexico.

The last time that Canada had qualified for the final Hexagonal that qualifies three teams directly for the World Cup and fourth for a playoff, it had been for France 1998, but they finished last, and with only one victory, far from the current one. campaign, under the technical direction of English John Herdman, the same one that had a resounding success first with the women’s team.

Far away in time and concepts was October 2012, when Honduras beat him 8-1 to qualify for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. That was the beginning of the fall to the deepest well until reaching sixteen matches without success and going down to 122nd position in the FIFA ranking. Things did not improve either for the classification to Russia 2018 at the hand of the Ecuadorian Octavio Zambrano, which lasted from March 2017 to January 2018, and after the World Cup they decided on Herdman, after her excellent time on the women’s team.

From then on, the goal was always to have a competitive team for the 2026 World Cup, in which Canada will share the venue with Mexico and the United States, but the good times were anticipated and The good results have already started to appear., to reach the highest historical position in the FIFA ranking, forty. Qualifying for the 2019/20 Concacaf Nations League was successfully faced, and in the 2019 Gold Cup it had already reached the quarterfinals and was eliminated there by Haiti, who came from 2-0 down to win 3 -2, but the main thing is the rise of new figures who seem willing to change the history of the team, such as Lucas Cavallini, the scorer of River Plate origin for the Vancouver Whitecaps of Major League Soccer, or Jonathan David, who fights to be the top scorer in Ligue 1 in which they play Lionel Messi, Neymar The Kylian Mbappé, and especially the Bayern Munich left-back, Alphonse Davies, a true emerging star of world football.

Davies was born in a refugee camp in Ghana, after his family fled the civil war in Liberia, and came to Canada at the age of five, to settle in the city of Edmonton and after showing his enormous talent in children’s and youth tournaments , was hired by the Vancouver Whitecaps until in July 2018 the Bayern Munich to take him after paying 10 million euros for his pass, a record for the teams of the Major League Soccer (MLS) of the United States, where this team participates.

David, the Lille striker, landed in Canada after being born in New York to a Haitian family. Cyle Larin, another of the figures of the Canadian team, is of Jamaican origin, while the captain, Atiba Hutchinson (with ninety caps) is Trinidadian. The last two play in the Besiktas Turkish, which gives them an important European experience, added to the steering wheel Stephen Eustaquio (Porto), defenders Steven Vitoria (Moreirense from Portugal), Scott Kennedy (Jahn Regensburg, from the second German) and Doneil Henry (Sowon Samsung Bluewings, from South Korea), the midfielders Harry Paton (Ross Country, Scotland) and Theodor Coirbeanu (Wolverhampton) and striker Junior Hoilett (Cardiff City FC).

“It is a special moment, and we are all grateful to be part of a generation that is making history. We are enjoying being the team with the highest progression in the world during 2021″, he told FIFA Kamal Miller, who as a defender was part of the 2-0 win over Honduras as a visitor last Thursday for the Concacaf final Hexagonal. Canada had managed, ten years later, to beat the team that had won 8-1 at home.

In the absence of four dates to finish the qualifying tournament for the Qatar World Cup 2022, Canada is the leader with 22 points, followed by the United States and Mexico, both with 18 (the three that at the moment are making it to the World Cup), while Panama, with 17, is in the playoff position. “Canada is a sleeping giant. It is a country of hockey –admits the DT John Herdman- but soccer is the most practiced sport and is ready to get into the fans. The women’s team had been very successful but only now are the boys starting to catch up.”. The English manager won 72 percent of the 36 games he coached. “Canada,” insists Herdman in an interview he gave to the BBC London– it is a country of 40 million inhabitants and improvement was only a matter of time. It is a country with a lot of immigration, especially Latin Americans or Africans, who bring a passion for soccer. That mixture of cultures and the investment that there was in this sport favored its development and made it even surpass hockey licenses”.

In this growth of Canadian soccer, the level of the coaches must be highlighted (many highlight the influence that Spanish had Benedict Floro, former coach of Albacete and Real Madrid, between 2013 and 2016), the institutional management and the level of the facilities, especially the indoor ones, because the cold months are very hard and more than once the tournaments had to be interrupted. But the passion not only did not diminish but with the closeness of the chances of qualifying for the World Cup for the second time in history (the previous one was in Mexico 1986, when they lost all three games of the group stage against France, Hungary and the Union Soviet) made the cities that apply for new teams increase and tickets are sold out faster and faster.

Without going any further, all the tickets for the fundamental match against Mexico last November in Edmonton, played in sub-zero temperatures and forty-four thousand people celebrated the 2-1 victory at the “Commonwealth Stadium”. This Sunday, Canada beat the United States 2-0 at the same venue, in another key game. If the greatest thing for the Canadian team was to have played in a World Cup, it is also important having won the 2000 Concacaf Gold Cup, which gave him the right to participate in the 2001 Confederations Cup in Japan and South Korea, in which he won one point out of nine against no less than Brazil, whom he managed to tie 0-0. Too won the 1985 Concacaf Championship and the 1990 North American Nations Cup. To all this we must add the two women’s team bronze medals in 2012 and 2016, and gold at Tokyo 2021, under the technical direction of Bev Priestman, Herdman’s successor, whose assistant she was.

For the writer and podcaster Duane Rollins, considered one of the greatest specialists in Canadian soccer, the turning point “was in 2007, when the MLS arrived in the country because in a certain way, it professionalized the entire system and academies began to emerge” and he especially points to a leader, Don Garber, the commissioner who brought the American tournament to Toronto nearly fifteen years ago. That situation put an end to what Rollins calls “the dark years” and another competition was created four years ago, the Canadian Premier League (CPL), the first national league since 1992, with eight participating teams and fully professional.

“The CPL would not exist without MLS,” says Rollins. Since then, much more money has been invested because It is very noticeable that people are much more involved with football”. Most of the Canadian national team players, in fact, participate in the MLS, where there are three teams from that country, from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

The results are visible.

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