Two days in a row! Maybe I’m not going to “retire,” after all (although if you read me carefully, you’ll note that I always said I was changing how I would write, not that I would stop writing). How much Canadian soccer writing happens here remains to be seen, but we do know how much football Forge’s Kyle Bekker has left to play.
About a month. The original CanPL signing and the league’s most successful team’s only captain, announced his retirement from professional football today. He just turned 36, so it was probably time. Especially with the salary limitations that are put on CanPL teams.
It only seems like Forge has an unlimited budget. The truth is that they are able to stay at the top of the league because of the way they effectively funnel players through the development pathways, which allows them to spend the cap room they save on older, veterans, who form the backbone of the club.
A club that will play for the Voyageurs Cup this month, the first CanPL club to make the final in a non-COVID-driven situation. They are also positioned to win another CanPL title, solidly sitting in second place in the table and staring at yet another championship showdown with Cavalry (a club that also builds its team from the foundation up — almost like that’s the way to do it in the CanPL).
Forge may come up second best in both occasions this year — it would be pretty shocking if the Whitecaps don’t win the V-Cup and the league title is a playoff coin flip, really — but regardless of the results, Bekker is going to go out on a high.
He’s got to be the fist CanPL player to get a CBC Sports article written about his retirement or have a mural painted (see above) of him at a popular burger joint in his hometown. It’s not a great rendition, but it’s one more mural than I ever had painted of myself.
Thinking of Bekker today has proven to be a nice cleanser to the Manchester City malaise I’ve been fighting this week. You can’t get much further from that world as the CanPL and the ability to care about both ends of the football spectrum has always been something I have taken pride in.
Bekker’s career fits pretty perfectly into my years of commenting on Canadian football. He was a star at Boston College during the run of 24th Minute 1.0, was drafted to TFC during my brief run at MLS Soccer Dot Com, I interviewed him several times on SoccerToday (including right after he won the USL title with the one-and-done San Francisco Deltas, which is among my favourite interviews/stories I’ve ever done/covered), and he was the CanPL’s first homecoming story. For those who don’t recall, I was the first person to report that the CanPL was happening, a story that I had years before the official announcement and, although I never doubted my sources, there was a period where a lot of people were pretty convinced I was making it up. So the day an actual player came home to commit to the league was one that I felt great relief at.
All this adds up to me having a certain affinity to Bekker. His retirement today, at a time where I find myself questioning a lot of things about my relationship with soccer, seems to also fit the mirroring narrative I’m trying to paint here.
But, I’m making this about me. Let’s not do that.
Bekker deserves a lot of credit for coming to the league. He had options in the US following the San Francisco year, where he was considered among the best players in the US system who was not in MLS. Although his early career in that league never stuck (where playing for the train wreck that was TFC then didn’t help), he was good enough in 2018 to play in MLS. Most of the top guys in USL were, but they made more money as prime players in the second tier as would has depth players in MLS.
Although the salary figures I’ve heard for Bekker in CanPL were higher than you’d think, they were still less than what he would have made either as a depth MLSer, or as a USL standout. He left money on the table to come home and it was a risk to come into a league that was given little chance to succeed by many.
Yet he did. For that reason, CanPL fans should be grateful. That he stuck around to prove that you could make a career as a domestic league player in Canada is a legacy to be very proud of.
Thank you, Kyle.
Notes:
For real, I don’t anticipate that I will continue this type of rhythm of soccer postings. One of the reasons I am winding down the blog is to allow me to write what I want — that’s going to include soccer writing from time to time, but I simply don’t have the capacity or bandwidth to chase stories and write regularly on the sport any longer. You deserve to know that, so you can understand what the rhythm here will be. Occasionally. Subscribe so you know when.
I have taken steps over the past two months to reduce my footprint on social media. It’s something I’m going to write about next as I want the primary place I engage with people to be here, not on the algorithm dystopia that is social media. That article will be written in one of my other blog spaces here (24th Minute — Politics, life and general nonsense), but will be promoted everywhere so you can find it and read it if you are so inclined. More soon, but the tl;dr of all this is I feel that if I reduce the amount of time I waste — and I do mean waste - -on social media then I will have enough time to regularly write about things that matter to me in this space. And to, hopefully, start to have meaningful engagement again that is not engagementbait-driven.