When the World Went Home — The Shape of Canadian Soccer
By Nii Wallace-Bruce
The epilogue to The Shape of Canadian Soccer, a five-part series on identity, infrastructure and the legacy of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
“I knew this was a football country and I could see how many people love the sport.”
Jesse Marsch said it in August 2026, but he was not talking about the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
He was remembering the period shortly after becoming the inaugural MLS head coach of the Montréal Impact, now CF Montréal.
Long before Canada hosted a men's World Cup, Marsch had seen something that was sometimes difficult to see from the outside: the depth of the country's attachment to football.
That distinction matters.
After Canada's exit to Morocco in the Round of 16 in Houston, there was a temptation to declare that the country had suddenly become a football nation. The result was historic. Hosting the tournament was historic. But neither created something that did not exist before.
Canada had the Olympic success of the women's program, including gold in Tokyo. It had Holger's Heroes, the 2000 men's team that won the country's only Gold Cup.
It had generations of players, coaches, immigrants and communities who had followed football long before the world arrived in 2026.
What World Cup 2026 did was make that culture visible.
It exposed the scale of something that had often existed in fragments: in immigrant communities, suburban parks, youth clubs, television subscriptions, national-team gatherings and the ambitions of young players who could finally see people like themselves wearing the Canadian shirt on football's biggest stage.
That visibility created an opportunity. The question now is what Canada does with it.
A World Cup can create attention. Attention can create money. Money can build infrastructure. Infrastructure needs credible institutions.
Credible institutions can help attract and retain talent.
Only then does attention become legacy.
The World Cup Exposed What Canada Already Had
Toronto carried one of the largest responsibilities of the tournament. Unlike Vancouver in 2015, the city had never hosted a senior FIFA World Cup tournament before.
The event gave Toronto an opportunity to reintroduce itself after years shaped by the pandemic, economic uncertainty and changing patterns of urban life.
The first match, with Canada and Bosnia, brought an initial burst of energy.
Bad weather and some local nonchalance clouded the first weekend, alongside the predictable and somewhat juvenile competition between Toronto and Vancouver over which Canadian city could claim the better football experience.
By the next match, the World Cup had found its rhythm.
The Global Toronto Area came alive. Streets filled. Communities gathered.
The arrival of Portugal and Croatia for a Round of 32 match demonstrated the scale and vibrancy of the city's diaspora communities.
Portugal manager Roberto Martínez even wished his team had played more matches in Toronto after experiencing the city's hospitality.
The most revealing evidence, however, was not inside the stadium.
Travelling through the GTA during the tournament, this writer counted 44 car flags representing the 48 participating nations.
Fans including Adam, a Ghanaian from Mississauga and Gordon, a Bosnian from Etobicoke, saw their nations of origin come to Toronto, while also being able to support their new nation of Canada.
Young players saw themselves represented in Canada's national team, with Brampton supplying a significant portion of the squad, including Cyle Larin, Liam Millar, and Tajon Buchanan. The tournament reached communities well beyond Toronto Stadium.
The City of Toronto provided pitches where people could play their own games.
Canadian Tire became part of an initiative aimed at expanding access to pitches around the country.
Businesses across Toronto's Business Improvement Areas embraced the tournament.
The World Cup became not simply something happening in a stadium, but something happening around the city.
That is important because Canada did not need the World Cup to prove that people could play football. It needed the World Cup to show how many people already wanted to.
Toronto proved it could absorb the spectacle.
The city could host hundreds of thousands of visitors, fill public spaces and turn diaspora identity into a visible part of a global sporting event.
But the temporary infrastructure also offered a warning. Within hours of the thrilling spectacle between Portugal and Croatia, the stands began coming down.
The next challenge is sustainability. A city can host a World Cup. The harder task is converting the attention generated by it into participation, investment and belonging.
That means getting children onto pitches. It means giving those children local teams to follow.
It means creating reasons for them to keep playing and watching once the flags come down.
Participation is achievable at grassroots level. Turning those participants into regular fans of MLS, CPL, and NSL clubs will require something else: winning.
Toronto has shown repeatedly that it gravitates towards winners.
The Bazbatchenko-Vanney era at Toronto FC demonstrated that sustained success on the field can translate into sustained attention off it.
Winning on the field converts to winning off the field.
But that requires an ecosystem capable of capturing the attention the World Cup created.
Attention Is Only Valuable If Someone Captures It
The World Cup proved something important about Canada. There is an audience for football.
The business challenge is proving there is a sustainable economy around that audience.
A successful football ecosystem requires more than packed stadiums.
It requires investment, infrastructure, media coverage, commercial partnerships and pathways that allow people to build careers in the sport.
The tournament created visibility. Visibility creates opportunity. But opportunity only matters if someone is prepared to capture it.
When PSP Media asked Canada Soccer Media and Entertainment CEO James Johnson in February about the commercial opportunities surrounding the tournament, he promised partnerships. Those partnerships arrived, including agreements with General Mills, Walmart and Canadian Tire.
Government support also followed.
Federal backing included funding for the game and a commitment to build a National Training Centre.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has spoken openly about the soft power available through football, and the government has recognized that a growing football economy can have value beyond the pitch. Having an Everton fan in the nation’s highest office can’t hurt for potential support in the future.
The Northern Super League provided another signal of its own.
Its major investment agreement with Apex Capital underlined the attractiveness of the Canadian football market to foreign capital.
Players and coaches, including Australia’s Kory Babington, have spoken of the level of investment being a factor in their decision to be a part of the newest professional football league in Canada.
That matters.
For decades, Canadian football often appeared to outsiders as a market with potential rather than a market capable of delivering. The World Cup changed the evidence.
But commercial attention is only useful if it produces a functioning ecosystem.
The summer also broadened the game's media footprint. Alphonso Davies' fitness saga generated mainstream headlines before and during the tournament.
More substantively, agreements returned men's and women's national-team matches to TSN, while OneSoccer is eventually set to become available to Rogers customers.
Those are meaningful gains.
But football remains more curiosity than daily habit in much of mainstream Canadian sports media.
Turn on Toronto sports radio on a September morning and the conversation is still more likely to concern Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s home runs, the NFL season, or the Maple Leafs than a Canadian club's match.
The problem is not that Canadians do not want football. It is that following football in Canada can still require considerable effort.
A supporter wanting to follow Canadians in Europe's major men's leagues can find themselves navigating Fubo, TSN, beIN Sports, OneSoccer and DAZN. Five subscriptions in a difficult economy is not a pathway to casual fandom. It is a barrier to entry.
The World Cup demonstrated that Canadians will watch football. The business challenge is proving they will continue to invest in it.
That requires turning attention into something more durable than a summer spike in viewing figures.
It requires building what sits underneath the audience.
The Real Legacy Lives Underneath the Stadium
Major tournaments reveal the strength of the systems beneath them. Canadian soccer has grown rapidly. It has not always grown evenly.
The most important work now happens away from the cameras.
Jesse Marsch took a hands-on role during the men's U-20 campaign at the CONCACAF Championships, helping Canada return to the FIFA U-20 World Cup after a 20-year absence.
More significant was the attempt to create continuity between that generation and the senior team, with Marsch and Mauro Biello introducing training concepts designed to bridge the gap. Marsch has also made clear his intention to bring younger players into senior-team environments.
That is how a national program becomes a system rather than a collection of individual generations.
Marsch, CanWNT head coach Casey Stoney and Canada Soccer technical director Kenneth Heiner-Møller have also been working to formalise a Canadian way of playing.
The irony is that the people currently helping define it are American, English and Danish.
That is not necessarily a weakness. The objective is for their work to eventually be absorbed by Canadian coaches and carried forward after they leave.
Canada Soccer continues to roll out initiatives aimed at developing those coaches. That work will take patience.
The next generation of Canadian coaches will not be created by a World Cup headline. They will be created by years of education, mentorship and opportunity.
The same is true of players.
Premier Soccer Leagues vice-president Dino Rossi hopes the tournament will generate greater interest and inspire young players to feel the excitement of representing Canada.
A centralised registration system is also due to be rolled out by Canada Soccer, promising a more streamlined pathway into the game.
Efficiency, however, does not necessarily mean affordability.
Parents continue to talk about the cost of youth football. For Amirya, high-level soccer is expensive between club fees, travel, hotels, tournaments, extra training.
While she and her husband are proud of their daughter, Arianna, the costs associated with supporting her dreams have put a strain on the everyday budget.
The sport remains comparatively accessible to hockey and requires considerably less equipment, but the financial burden is still real for many families.
That is why pitches matter. Registration matters. Coaches matter. The pathways between youth football and the national teams matter.
The World Cup can inspire a generation. A strong system develops one. There are international lessons to consider.
Japan has treated its men's and women's World Cups as part of a much longer project to establish itself as a leading football nation.
Australia provides a more cautionary example: the Matildas' run to the semi-finals of the 2023 Women's World Cup generated enormous national attention, but the benefits of hosting did not automatically become permanent. Football Australia has since faced financial difficulties, while domestic club Western United ceased operations in 2026.
Hosting is not a development strategy. It is an opportunity to accelerate one. Canada now has to decide what it wants that strategy to be.
And that brings the question back to the institution responsible for building it.
Pitches and pathways will be key for the future of the game in Canada (Photo credit: Amirya Paquette)
Canada Now Has Something To Sell
For Canada Soccer, the World Cup represented both an achievement and an obligation.
The organization reached a moment generations had dreamed about: hosting and competing at the world's biggest football event.
It also arrived there carrying a history of mistrust.
Previous disputes with national-team players and the fallout from the drone-spying scandal that overshadowed the women's team at the 2024 Olympics had damaged confidence in the institution. The World Cup did not erase that history. But it created the possibility of turning the page.
The most telling change was how little institutional drama accompanied Canada's tournament compared with previous cycles.
The biggest controversy involving the men's team was Jesse Marsch's apparent use of Alphonso Davies as a decoy against Switzerland.
For Canada Soccer, that is progress. Trust is being rebuilt with the general public. But trust is not the same as trustworthiness. The latter has to be demonstrated over time.
The collective bargaining agreement reached with the national teams at the beginning of the year was one step. The launch of the Women's Canadian Championship was another. The effort to streamline player-development pathways, with input from senior and youth officials, represents another.
The appointments of Marsch and Stoney were not simply about winning the next match. They were part of a broader attempt to create continuity around the national programs.
Behind them, Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue has pursued fundraising & government support as well as public engagement through CanadaRed.
Further, the Canada Soccer Foundation raised $25 million towards investment through the Canada Rising initiative.
The timing is significant. For the first time, Canada's men's and women's programs are simultaneously competitive, qualifying for their respective World Cups and contending at major tournaments.
That is not a finished product. It is a foundation. And a foundation gives Canada something it has rarely possessed in football: a coherent story to sell.
To sponsors. To governments. To investors. To coaches. And, perhaps most importantly, to players.
Because the most revealing customers for that story are not corporations.
They are dual nationals deciding which shirt to wear.
Who Wants To Buy It?
Every dual-national decision tells a story. The players who choose Canada matter. So do the players who do not.
Marcelo Flores represented the opportunity. Rayan Elloumi represents the challenge.
Flores had multiple international options and chose Canada.
His decision did not guarantee a place on the World Cup field — injury ultimately kept him from playing — but it represented something important about the changing appeal of the national program. Elloumi was kept from the field at the World Cup, due to internal upheaval and a rare in-tournament managerial change for the Carthage Eagles.
Alfie Jones, Owen Goodman, Niko Sigur, Promise David and Daniel Jebbison are among the other players around whom Canada has worked to build relationships.
The basic question is no longer whether Canada possesses enough talent. The World Cup answered that.
The question is whether Canada can create an environment in which talented players want to belong. That question is not new.
Canada has spent decades navigating it.
Tomasz Radzinski, Owen Hargreaves and Jonathan and Julian de Guzman are reminders that dual-national football existed long before the current generation.
What has changed is the competitive context. For players with Canadian roots and global options, the national-team decision increasingly involves more than eligibility.
It involves development, competitive opportunity, coaching, belonging and the credibility of the project. Canada's World Cup performance strengthened that pitch.
The team looked united. It competed credibly on the biggest stage. Its players gained international exposure. That exposure has value in the club market.
Jonathan David’s transfer to Atletico Madrid, Nathan Saliba's move to Villarreal, Promise David's transfer to Brighton, Jayden Nelson's move to Bolton and Stephen Eustáquio's move to Swansea demonstrate how visibility at international level can intersect with club opportunities.
The World Cup did not create those players. It amplified them. The same logic applies in reverse.
Rayan Elloumi's decision to represent Tunisia is a reminder that Canada's talent pool is global and its competitors are too.
For Owen Goodman, there is Montreal-born Yassine Bounou.
For Promise David, Vancouver-born Omar Marmoush.
For Niko Sigur, Ferdi Kadıoğlu.
For Marcelo Flores, Rayan Elloumi.
Every choice is a referendum on the attractiveness of a football project. Canada's challenge is therefore not simply to produce players. It is to become a destination.
The next generation needs to believe that the red-and-white shirt offers a serious football future, not simply an emotional connection to a country their parents or grandparents once called home. Zachary Zalewski, Grady McDonnell, and Valter Sedin represent the next generation of dual nationals that could choose Canada at senior level.
That is where the success of 2026 matters most. The national team finally has evidence to support the sales pitch. But evidence has to be renewed.
If Canada can win a Gold Cup or Nations League while the United States and Mexico move through periods of transition, the perception of the program will shift again.
Sustained success would make the argument stronger. Canada would no longer be asking dual nationals to believe in a future. It would be showing them one.
And that brings the discussion back to the people who matter most. The kids watching. The kids playing.
The kids who will decide whether this was merely a World Cup they remember or the moment their country's football culture changed permanently.
The Actual Legacy Test
The World Cup gave Canadian soccer something it had long sought. Attention. But attention fades.
The lights have dimmed. The crowds have gone home. The advertising and temporary hoardings have been removed. The temporary stands have disappeared.
The world has moved on to its next story. That is precisely when Canada's story becomes interesting.
The legacy of 2026 will not be measured by how many people visited Toronto Stadium. It will be measured by what happens in the parks.
By how many children register to play.
By whether those children, like Arianna, can afford to stay in the game.
By whether there are enough pitches.
By whether there are enough Canadian coaches.
By whether youth players can see a clear path to the national teams.
By whether domestic clubs can turn participation into fandom.
By whether the media continues to cover football when there is no World Cup.
By whether sponsors and investors remain interested after the global spotlight moves elsewhere.
And by whether the next generation of dual nationals sees Canada as an alternative or a destination. This is why Toronto remains the right place to end the story.
During the World Cup, the city became a temporary meeting point for the football world.
Portuguese flags hung beside Croatian ones. Canadian shirts appeared in neighbourhoods across the GTA. Children saw players from Brampton wearing the national shirt. People who had spent years following football in relative isolation suddenly found themselves surrounded by others who cared just as much.
That feeling was real. But feelings are not infrastructure. A tournament can create memories. Only a system can create futures.
Canada proved in 2026 that it could host a World Cup.
It proved that Canadians would watch.
It proved that businesses would invest.
It proved that governments would support the game.
It showed that the national teams could compete.
It demonstrated that international players would consider Canada a serious option.
Now comes the harder part.
Can those things survive without the World Cup? Jesse Marsch knew Canada was a football country before the tournament arrived. The rest of the world knows it now too.
The real legacy question is whether Canada will still look like one when the next generation takes the field.
The World Cup was not the final chapter.
It was the beginning of the next test.
Sources:
Murray Mollard, “The Canadian Men’s Soccer Team at the World Cup and Beyond”, Harbour Publishing, 2026
Christine Sinclair with Stephen Brunt, “Playing the Long Game: A Memoir”, Vintage Canada, 2023
Canada Soccer, “Canada Soccer - CSME Binding Agreement” 12 February, 2026
Canada Soccer, “Collective Bargaining Agreement” 31 March, 2026
Olivia Chow, Toronto mayor, media scrum, 12 December, 2025
John Tory, Former Toronto mayor, personal interview, 12 December, 2025
Peter Augruso, Canada Soccer President, personal interview, 27 March 2026
Canada Soccer, “Canada Soccer to receive $9.8 million from Government of Canada for National Training Centre project”, 1 May, 2026
Goverment of Canada, “Making Generational investments in the future of Soccer and Sport in Canada”, 1 May 2026
Christine Sinclair, NSL part-owner, Vancouver Rise, public lecture, 6 May, 2026
Dwayne DeRozario, FIFA World Cup 2026 Ambassador - Toronto, public lecture, 8 May, 2026
Canada Soccer Media and Entertainment , “Canadian Soccer Media & Entertainment Releases Refined Vision to Accelerate Growth of Soccer in Canada”, 22 April 2026
James Johnson, Canada Soccer Media and Entertainment CEO, press conference, 13 February, 2026
Sportico, “Canadian Soccer Media Firm Finally Escapes Rogers’ TV Bottleneck”, Justin Birnbaum, Michael McCann, 12 May, 2026
Gordon Karacic, Canadian-Bosnian business owner, personal interview, 17 June 2026
Andrew, Ghana supporter, personal interview, 17 June 2026
Transfermarkt US, “Canada”, 3 September 2026
JFA, “Japan's way- Our National Football Philosophy”, 3 July 2026
These Football Times, “Japan and the 100-year vision”, George Pitts, 1 July 2018
Northern Super League, “APEX Takes Strategic Stake in the Northern Super League, Canada's First Professional Women's Soccer League”, 7 July 2026
Canada Soccer, “5 takeaways from Canada’s inspirational run at the 2026 FIFA World Cup”, Daniel Squizzato, 6 July 2026
Canada Soccer, “Canada Soccer Launches Inaugural W Canadian Championship”, 16 July 2026
Amirya Paquette, Arianna’s mother, personal interview, 14 July 2026
Kory Babington, Calgary Wild Interim Head Coach, press conference, 6 September 2026
Dino Rossi, Premier Soccer Leagues Vice President, personal interview, 30 August 2026
Canada Soccer, “'Canada Rising' Campaign Surpasses $25 Million”, 3 July 2026
Photo Credits:
Exhibition Place, Nii Wallace-Bruce, 14 June 2026 - Photo courtesy of Nii Wallace-Bruce
Arianna at Markham FC, Amirya Paquette - Photo courtesy of Amirya Paquette
Video Credits
Cristiano Ronaldo greets fans in Toronto, 433, 1 July 2026 - Original video courtesy of Nii Wallace-Bruce
All photos are used with permission. All rights reserved to the creator.
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