C-League

Eh-League would be really meta

 

"If you look at football around the world I mean you have Serie A, Serie B, Serie C, Liga Pro, there’s no reason why we couldn’t have very similar type – obviously not the quantity you have in those countries and we just don’t have the sheer numbers, but in terms of a structure"

Sorry, you shouldn't even be trying to mention the league structure of other countries then say, "we could try that here, too." Especially not four levels.

 

What about Canadian Soccer Championship?

Just a thought.

 

The OSA's PDL decision has nothing to do with the C-league. It's about strengthening the youth development potential of L1O as well as the OPDL, which many teams have been reticent to join.

The argument was that L1O was too low level to compare to PDL, but with the progress they've made in the past 2 years alone, it looks like they are coming close in the near future. It's in everyone's best interests to be in the same system if that ends up being the case.

The OSA is just pushing for it faster than the teams want to on their own. It's a bit of a chicken or the egg situation. Good move, I think.

I mean, geographically London, and K-W and TFC are ideally suited to join L1O (TFC was already being forced to anyways before this).

Thunder bay though. They are in a tough spot either way.

Right now they have to drive 7-15 hours to get to their PDL division games. L1O means 13 hours minimum(to Windsor) or 15hrs plus to the GTA.

Word is they may still get a temporary exemption. Long term seems like it's ideal if they join the prairie league.

Its still in development but when they do they plan to have a number of teams in Winnipeg, which is 7hrs from TB.

The rest of the prairies are all 10-15hrs away, so it's not much worse.

 

I think the CSA should just bite the bullet and let Canadian teams join the NASL. They've said that they won't go ahead with the league unless they have teams in Toronto and Vancouver and nobody is stepping up to the plate. Let Hamilton, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Quebec City join NASL, stabilize that league, and if they ever manage to get the Canadian league off the ground, at least they'll have some built-in fanbases to provide revenue/buzz.

 

I agree with you. I also think it is absolutely ridiculous to put teams in any Canadian D2 league in the MLS cities.

The CSA, however, disagrees and they are the ones making the plan.

(As an aside, the NASL also has foreign team limits imposed by the USSF which would make it impossible for very many Canadian cities to join.)

 

The thing is, TFC draws poorly on television. I don't see how a D2 team in Toronto, drawing flies at the gate, will somehow be a lucrative TV asset.

I think Polygong's idea is a good one - get representation in the MLS cities by moving the USL teams over. It also gives you three teams that will be stable regardless of attendance. That's not a small thing in a league that's likely to start with just eight teams.

 

Kingston, the USSF limits leagues to 25% non-american clubs. For NASL, (assuming Puerto Rico counts as an american club, and the 3 new franchises start, and San Antonio doesn't fold) that would allow 2 Canadian teams to join now (probably Hamilton and Calgary for provincial rivalries) to raise NASL to 16 teams. They said they wanted to reach 20 clubs, so once they get another 3 american teams, they could add either Winnipeg or Quebec City to the mix. That would account for the minimum 7 professional clubs that the Easton Report says were the minimum critical mass to develop soccer in Canada. If the Ottawa Fury could convince MLS that they deserve a 29-32 expansion slot (very remote), then one or the other of Winnipeg or Quebec City could then join NASL.

Polygong, the MLS II teams are in a development league with reduced costs for a reason. They exist to support the main team, not compete with it. Why would they join a league that requires more travel and higher transportation costs? And I think there is some reason those teams aren't allowed to join. Not to mention if the CSA tries to force the MLS clubs to join the new league, the clubs may just chose to dissolve their 2nd clubs as unsustainable, setting Canadian soccer development back even further.

In my ideal world, a Div 2 Canadian Soccer League would have 10 clubs (mostly backed by the CFL) in two conferences playing an unbalanced 26-game season from Mid-April to Mid-October - 4 games against each in-conference opponent (with travel by bus) and 2 games against each team from the opposite conference (max 5 round-trip plane rides) to minimize travel costs. Playoffs the last two weeks in October with a play-in game between the top 2 teams in each conference followed by a home-and-home series between the winners of the play-in games. Or just run the playoffs like the CFL for familiarity.

Western Teams would be based in Edmonton (FC), Calgary, Saskatoon (the Whitecaps have a residency program there, but it could be run by the BC Lions), Regina, and Winnipeg. Eastern Teams would play in Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa (Fury), Montreal, and Quebec City (the NASL lobby group could run this one). We'd have to leave out BC and the Maritimes because transportation costs would bring down the league just to service those outliers.

Salary Cap would be under $1 million (assuming TSN throws in a decent TV deal and crowds average ~5-6ooo per game to make all this viable). Teams could have a maximum of 8 international players on their 26-player roster, the rest would have to be Canadian. That would guarantee 30 Canadian players playing every week with reserve players training hard to win a position on the gameday 18. The Players to fill roster spots would be come from the best players in the regional Div 3 Semi-Pro leagues.

These teams would compete with the MLS clubs for the Voyageur Cup annually.

 

^ Yes, this could work. So could a bunch of similar ideas that have been proposed over time. I don't think it will, however.

What is comes down to is: Which eight Canadian cities are going to consistently bring average crowds of 5000 or more for D2 soccer?

Right now, Ottawa has done it for one single season. That's it in the whole country.

So we're going to hope that seven teams can suddenly spring into being with crowds of 5000 or more so this league can exist. That seems overly optimistic to me. Especially when balanced against the evidence from the history of people actually trying lower tier soccer in Canada from the days of the CSL right up to FC Edmonton today.

 

The Salary Cap and the league itself isn't going to work. No Canadian League, C-League, CSL, Home-and-Native League is going to work with a $1 million dollar salary cap and competing against MLS (in town) and European football (on TV). It just isn't.

Your points are absolutely correct when quantified with "assuming TSN and 5000-6000 fans a game". However that isn't going to happen unless they have 'free beer and sex' night, which won't get approved.

People in Winnipeg, Quebec and Hamilton are not going to come out and watch a Canadian League if they have the slightest feeling that the league is second rate, which it will be.

The early poster who eluded to the Australian structure was probably closest in a successful vision.

Lets position the MLS teams, some NASL teams, some USL and PDL teams into an overall North American pyramid and back it up with a solid amateur league system.

 

Being in an American League costs Canadian owners a ton of money, especially for travel. But the biggest killer? The Canadian dollar. Right now, you have a club like FC Edmonton, who have been bleeding money at an insane rate since inception, paying many of their costs in American dollars, but getting revenue in Canadian dollars, which is at .75 cents U.S and projected to go down to .70. How the hell do you make that work? You can't.

That's a massive reason to have a Canadian league. To be able to throw in a few bus trips instead of flights, have expenses in Canadian dollars and potentially have t.v exposure (if the Bell rumours are true), puts this league light years ahead of being in the NASL.

Hey Tom Fath, Puerto Rico just joined the league again, have fun shelling out for your team to get there!

 

Agreed ^

 

To me, the relevant (and major) difference is that Australia doesn't border on the US. Australia therefore doesn't have the option of entering teams in a neighbouring country's league. Canada does so, for owners here, they get to choose between trying to start a Canadian league or entering a fully functional US league at whatever level of the pyramid suits them. Thus far, the owners have voted with their money for the US league.

No, the worst case scenario is that we find ourselves in 2025 back where we were in 2015 and realize we've lost another decade. That the hopelessly optimistic C-League teams we tried to start failed and squandered resources and poisoned ownership groups and fans and that now, in 2025, we've got to try to find people still willing to try to get back into the PDL or USL or NASL (whose standards will be ten years higher than they are today).

Very much yes to this. Let Canadian pro teams form at the level their city can support. Don't force teams up to levels they can't sustain or hold back teams that could be higher. Don't force anyone to compete in the same city as MLS. Tie it all together through the Voyageur's Cup. And, by all means, leverage things like CFL teams where it makes sense (Hamilton? Calgary? Pretty sure it's not Regina, though.)

And also yes to this.

 

A whole generation has passed since they last tried it in the 1990s and soccer has made more inroads into Canadian culture. I don't think failure would poison the well, but having the backing of another professional league and TV network who are willing to cover the first 10 years of losses should allow the league to get on its feet. The rivalry aspect is important just to get fans to care. I have to admit as a Fury supporter, there is an extra level of rivalry when FC Edmonton comes to town that's not there with the other NASL teams, save maybe Minnesota and the Cosmos. Maybe it could work, but if there is any time to try this, it's now.

Cities with populations of over 500K should have no problem supporting a Div 2 team, cities with 200K might need some time to build up their fanbases. But there's a problem - the CSA seems to think that any league has to have teams in the current MLS market cities in order to survive, and that's not happening in Toronto or Vancouver. That said, there is a lot of frustration with TFC fans that might consider supporting another team, but the longer it takes and TFC starts getting their act together, the window of opportunity is closing. I'm not sure about Vancouver. Marketing is important too. TSN had better give good production values, which seems likely given their experience producing MLS games over the past couple of years. And if the CSA could convince EA to add this new league to FIFA18, that would also raise its profile.

I think the key here is for the teams to play an entertaining brand of soccer to keep fans coming back, even if it's at a lower level than MLS. It would still be ours. I think boring 4-4-2 route-one soccer is what would turn a lot of people off. For that, we need quality coaches with good tactical acumen. The only Canadian coaches I know of like that work in MLS already.