A league of good intentions

Are good intentions good enough?

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

The fact that Canada does not have a professional women’s soccer league is an embarrassment.

It represents a lack of ambition and bravery. Canadians are risk adverse to a fault. This is a case where that small-c conservatism has resulted in a situation that is completely unfair to 50% of the population, if not outright discriminatory.

With that in mind, you can’t help but tip your hat to Diana Matheson and her announcement (along with Christine Sinclair) yesterday that they are planning on starting a women’s pro league in 2025.

Who can blame them for getting sick of waiting for someone to start it for them? There has been a lot of empty words over the years, after all.

The plan is certainly ambitious. Matheson says that there will be eight teams to start, with four in the west and four in the east. She also indicated that they have commitments from Calgary Foothills and the Vancouver Whitecaps to put a team in the league, as well as corporate support from Air Canada and CIBC.

Additionally, Matheson says that there will be one National Team player on each team.

This all seems great. And, it would be. I badly want to see it happen.

However, there does need to be some sober reflection as well.

There was a tad too much hand waving away questions about how the league would be financed in the announcement and in interviews that have followed. I can only speculate that the timing of the news drop is at least partially to take advantage of the increased attention the sport is getting during the men’s World Cup in an effort to attract more corporate support.

Certainly, when speaking to TSN, that’s what Matheson pointed to when asked how the league would cover salaries for the players.

I say this as respectfully as possible. It’s a little naive to think that there is that kind of money out there in corporate Canada to do that. They won’t be the first league to come calling, or the only league looking for help now.

There are two reasons that companies support sports properties. They do so as part of their community initiatives — they want to look good — or to increase brand awareness. The former has a limited financial output available, and the new league can’t really offer the latter.

That’s something the CanPL and CSB has learned over the past few years. They have some big names associated with the league, but the money involved is nowhere near what people think.

They don’t even get a discount on flights from WestJet, despite the airline being a league sponsor. There is far less money out there than you think. Far. Less.

It’s unclear to me why it would be different with a start-up league for the women.

Here’s the thing: CSB and CanPL has been working on a women’s league proposal. They haven’t been moving as quickly as I, or others, would like, but they have been. They have investigated the very things that Matheson is talking about.

Additionally, as I’ve been told a couple times this week, the resistance to the women’s project mostly left the league office this year. Draw your own conclusions as to why, but I’m told that there is far more interest in a women’s league now than there was at this time last year.

There are people at the league office who have been working very hard at the project, in fact. For a lot longer than the 6-months that Matheson said her team has been. Those people are feeling a little discouraged today by an announcement that they see as premature and possibly harmful, I’m told.

There is not enough interest or understanding out there for two groups to be chasing the same thing without ultimately sinking each other. One has to step aside so that all efforts are coming from a single source.

As fans, you are bound to want the source to step aside to be the CanPL/CSB group. Matheson and Sinclair make for a much more likable face to the project than a bunch of dudes in suits on King Street in Toronto.

Sadly, though, the suits are in a better position to get $80-million (according to the numbers Matheson has provided) in seed money to start this league than a former soccer player doing her MBA. I don’t mean to be cruel about it, but think about it from a detached business perspective.

Bay Street doesn’t care about Bronze Medals. The Bronze medal might get you the meeting, but after that, what matters is a solid business plan that shows where and when the profits are going to come.

What would be best is for Matheson’s group to reach out to CSB and work with them to get this done. We may not like how CSB came to be, but the reality is that they are here and they are set-up to support Canadian soccer. There has been work done and contacts made.

CIBC, for instance, is already a CSB partner. One person I spoke to today suggested that it was unclear how that partnership deal would allow them to also support a second group in the soccer sector.

It’s madness to try to go it alone. You would be competing for an already tiny amount of money available for the sport. They need to work together, or risk taking each other down.

The Matheson group has a lot of good ideas and it’s coming from a place of good intentions.

Good intentions have never been enough though. It’s time for everyone that cares about this sport in Canada to pull in a single direction to get the women a league that they deserve.