If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

It was never an expansion announcement

It never felt right.

From the moment that the CanPL announced that Saskatchewan had been granted an “expansion team” back in 2021, this space had always been the wet blanket in the feel good story about bringing professional soccer to the province.

The problem, as was pointed out time and time again, was that saying you want to do something is not the same thing as actually doing it.

I want to write a best selling novel. I am writing a blog post about soccer.

The Saskatchewan group (they who pushed Joe Belan out because he wasn’t moving fast enough and was too conservative for their liking — more on that in a minute) really just wanted to build a stadium. Importantly, they wanted public money to do that. To help make that happen they said that they wanted to bring pro soccer to Saskatoon. They said that, anyway.

Who knows, maybe they did. What we do know is that they did exactly none of that. Make no mistake, if they were hellbent on making pro soccer happen (with their own money and business plan) we’re naming the team right now, rather than writing an obit.

But, we’re writing that obit. In fact, it now seems like pro soccer in Sask. is a very long way away, indeed.

Ultimately, what this appears to have been is exactly what the naysayers had always suggested: a real estate play. Build a stadium and then use that stadium to attract further development. When that plan started to seem unrealistic, suddenly the interest in the soccer side went away. Go figure.

The biggest loser in all of this is the Saskatchewan fan who bought into what the CanPL and Living Sky were selling. I’m sure many today will blame the city and province for not handing over the money to the group — or for Belan for his law suit against Living Sky Sports & Entertainment and PrairieLand — but the truth is that everything around this bid was…off from the beginning.

There’s not a lot of positives to take away, other than a hope that the CanPL has learned a lesson and won’t make anymore cart-before-horse expansion announcements moving forward. They seemed to pull their punches a bit more when they made the Windsor announcement, so there is reason to think that they already have changed the approach.

You see, there’s nothing inherently wrong with announcing that you have entered into an exclusive negotiating contract with a group in a city, but be honest about what you are talking about. If the team is dependent on a stadium deal that isn’t there yet then it’s not an expansion announcement.

There was never an expansion announcement for Saskatchewan.

There was never a team. Hopefully, the market hasn’t now been poisoned by the experience so that one day there might be.

In the meantime, fans in Saskatchewan might want to focus on building something up from a lower level — perhaps getting behind a League1 Canada team in the proposed prairie league. Success there could lead to bigger things down the road.

You know, do what Belan — the guy that spent a significant amount of time and money investigating the feasibility of the team before getting pushed aside — suggested.