Oh say can you see (what a mess this may be)
When everything is political it's hard to stick to sports
Watching the Super Bowl felt different this year. At the risk of being told to stick to sports, it’s hard as a Canadian to approach anything that comes out of the United States with the same level of enthusiasm that we might have in the past.
It was such with the big game in 2025. I watched, sure, but not without a sense of being an outsider that was perhaps never there before. It’s not that I ever thought that the Super Bowl wasn’t a uniquely and profoundly America thing — it’s always been four hours of jingoism, wrapped up as a football game — but, in the past, I could find amusement in it, enjoyment even.
As Canadians we have always watched the US with a slightly detached sense of irony. It was funny to us, not menacing.
Now? Well…you know.
It’s a little difficult to maintain any level of detachment when the President of the United States is openly talking about annexing Canada and, even worse than that, a significant amount of Americans are just fucking going along with it, as if it was a sensible or sane thing for the President of the United States to say.
This isn’t a post about politics, however (in so much as it is possible to talk about anything in the United States right now without it being political). It’s also not a post about the Super Bowl. I’m sure you can find a much better break down of that elsewhere.
What watching the Super Bowl got me thinking about is what this season of football (the kind I do write about here) is going to look like in Canada, where we are significantly interwoven within the US pyramid.
It’s going to be weird. There’s no way around that. At least in the three MLS cities, where there will be at least 17 reminders that we aren’t necessarily playing in cities where everyone wants us to be there.
There will be at least 17 other times when we get to express our feelings towards all this too, during the playing of the national anthems. Those feelings will be expressed in a low groan of a noise that washes over the stadiums, drowning out the efforts of the poor singer tasked with attempting to perform it.
This will be despite the earnest call to show respect that will be made by stadium officials (and possibly the team’s back up centre half). I’m also sure that call will be ignored and those who are inclined to be offended by such things will gnash their teeth and talk about how disappointed they are in us for daring to show our displeasure about a foreign leader openly musing about fucking annexing us.
Sorry, I said this wasn’t supposed to be political.
But, I mean, what are we even supposed to do with all this? How are we to feel about being Canadian soccer fans that cheer for teams that play in an American league?
Quick note to the CanPL fans reading this…Look, by all means, you are free to feel a little superior here, but let’s not pretend that anything in the Canadian system doesn’t rely on our attachment to the US system — the CanPL is full of players that have touched it at some point. If you care about the overall system then this is something that we all should be concerned with.
Also, I see you swapping your Forge strip for your TFC one as you travel between the stadiums. You’re not fooling us here.
The choices we have made over many years means we’re kind of stuck with them for a bit.
It might be time to start thinking about what choices we are going to make moving forward so we can start to detach ourselves from them. That’s going to be a long and difficult conversation and it’s going to have a lot of moving parts.
For the first time since the mid aughts and the choice to seek inclusion in MLS, one of those parts is that we may need to start to think about is whether the three MLS teams should be in MLS?
Look…this is a question that I have addressed multiple times in the past and I’ve always been consistent in my answer. That answer was that it is a benefit to have club teams playing at the highest level possible and right now there is a significant difference between the quality that the CanPL can provide and what you can build in MLS.
Just because the USA elected an imbecile with a God complex and a desire to revisit the concept of manifest destiny, doesn’t mean my opinion has changed. It would hurt Canadian soccer to lose its MLS teams.
Prior to the Americans losing their damn minds (again with the politics), this was purely a theoretical question. Now, I honestly don’t know.
I don’t think MLS is on Donald Trump’s radar at the moment, but God knows what that man might do. He wrote an Executive Order about straws, for God’s sake. An A Keeping American Soccer Red White and Blue Executive Order wouldn’t be any more frivolous, would it? It’s no longer absurd to think that there might not be a choice for the Canadian teams in the near future. They may be forced out of the American league.
Some may think this is reactionary, but….you tell me if anything that’s happening now makes sense to you, or if it was at all predictable only a few years ago. We may need to re-evaluate what is and is not reactionary.
For the record, I don’t think this scenario will happen. However, I also no longer feel completely at ease with the stability of the MLS teams. Or, for that matter, the Blue Jays and Raptors. That’s a different blog, though.
In the grand scheme of things, what is to become of our sports teams is probably not the most important thing happening, but if you are someone that cares about sports, it’s distressing. I care about these teams and I’m legitimately concerned what the next four years is going to look like for them. At a minimum, there is going to be economic (CAD vs USD) and labour pressures (work visas) that are going to make it difficult for them.
Taking a step back from the long view (at a basic level, the 2025 season will likely run mostly the same as it was going to. If there is a significant disruption it will be in 2026 and beyond) there is a black cloud hanging over the MLS season. I’m not sure what it’s going to feel like in the stadium when TFC kicks off. Maybe it will be cathartic — an opportunity to collectively express ourselves and embrace our clubs — in Toronto’s case, a club we have now supported for 19 years now. We can’t just flip a switch and turn off our interest, which is why the inevitable suggestion of “just support the CanPL instead” isn’t an answer — it can fill part of a void, but there would still be a deeply felt loss...
…unless there isn’t, which also worries me. Maybe I’ll take one look at the generic blandness of Charlotte FC, see that American flag on their strips, and be left feeling empty by the pointlessness of it all. What once mattered have been taken from me by external factors well beyond my control. That scenario is maybe the saddest possible outcome of all.
It’s hard to say how this is all going to play out, but it’s pretty clear that it’s going to be a weird season, and an even more uncertain future.
As a purely theoretical experiment, I believe the Canadian MLS clubs getting dropped would be absolutely detrimental to Canadian football as a whole. CanPL can afford to grow slowly because there's the big three, not in spite of them.
Say what you will about the results of the Insigne deal, but that doesn't happen in a CanPL-only Canadian system.
All that said, as much as there's talk of annexing Canada, I don't think they have the patience or willingness to do the work to actually make that happen. I don't like it one bit, but I'm not losing sleep about it either.
Like all things with the US, the "ideal" situation is to be integrated as much as possible. That world is dead, however, likely forever.
Canada needs to become self-reliant in everything moving forward, including sports. For soccer, our three MLS teams should join the CPL much sooner than they would normally want (say 2028?)
The only real difficulty I would see is having the six Canadian NHL teams break off and take the Stanley Cup, which is an absurd thought now but, the way this is going, may not be crazy in 2027.