By Ben Knight

 

With this week’s happy news that Edmonton is joining Whatever The Second Division Is Called in 2011, Canada now apparently has four men’s professional soccer teams. 

Edmonton sources confirm the CSA has already invited the new team to join Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver in the Voyageurs Cup a year from now.

Much has already been written about possible formats for such a tournament, so I’m going to write from a more emotional perspective.

Maybe you have to live here – and be immersed in the soccer scene – to understand why a true Canadian soccer league is never going to fly.  Geography is unalterable.  The lack of facilities will take decades to address.  Lack of public interest longer still.

Personally, I’ve always welcomed the obstacles.  It’s much more competitively and dramatically interesting to have Canadian teams in a cross-border league with the Americans. 

Canada-only could easily become worse that Scotland, with the same teams winning all the time, and everyone else struggling to put a few hundred fans in the stands.

I have always argued that the Voyageurs Cup should be opened to amateur and semi-pro teams, as well.  The reigning CSL champions from Trois-Rivieres should have been given some oddball chance to qualify.  Maybe a home-and-home with the Montreal Impact, who finished last in the V-Cup round-robin a year ago.  The fact that TR is Montreal’s farm team feels like an irresistible bonus.

But with Edmonton’s inclusion, I’d like to suggest putting further expansion of the Canadian championship tournament on hold – for one year.

Let’s do a four-team round robin in 2011.  A double one – with everybody playing everyone else twice.   

It’s not a practical long-term solution.  Too many games for teams with limited resources and tiny rosters.  Also, it’s almost inevitable one or two teams will be mathematically ousted early, and several of the late matches will be essentially meaningless.

A single round-robin would address this.  Everyone plays everybody once, with two teams getting two home games, and the others just one.  Six matches in total – just like now.  Maybe a seventh – please! – a one-game national championship final, held on Canada Day.

(That last part is going to be really tough to swing.  Either you ask all four teams to hold July 1 open on their schedules (which is a waste of a primo date) or you award the game to one team at the get-go, and hope like heck you don’t end up with a neutral-site game, which will be a very hard sell wherever the game is played.  Toronto-Montreal in Edmonton?  Whitecaps-TFC in Montreal?)

What would be wonderful – for one year – is a shadow Canadian league.  We’re never going to get one any other way. 

Remember – Canada is the world’s greatest hockey nation, and does not have its own top-flight pro league.  Superb regional junior hockey leagues?  Oh yeah! – and that’s also the best model for moving Canadian soccer forward.  Pro teams in MLS and Insert Name Of Division Two Here, junior clubs all over everywhere developing future Canadian World Cup stars.

Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton.  Run it for a year, and then figure out how to crown a national semi-pro champion, and get them involved in qualifying. 

There will never be enough clubs or resources to make Canadian pro soccer thrive on its own.  Yes, MLS is saddled with the blandness of endless interchangeable opponents, most of whom still don’t have distinct identities for TFC fans even after three full and dramatic seasons.  But seeing nothing but Canadian opposition all the time will get dreadfully dull, really fast.

A four-team double round-robin is not sustainable, nor should it be.  But it would be an awesome thing to experience once – and a fine dramatic yardstick for all future Voyageurs Cup formats to be measured against.

And it will be huge fun – especially if nobody even remotely understands it Stateside.

Onward!