Canada gets premier league in '19

Hamilton team in new Canadian Premier League, which starts in 2019

Thespec.com
Jan. 11, 2018
By Steve Milton

The Canadian Premier Soccer League announced Wednesday morning that its inaugural season will kick off in the spring of 2019.

The new coast-to-coast professional league - with one of its founding teams in Hamilton - has also scored a coup in appointing David Clanachan as its first commissioner.

The 55-year-old Clanachan is the chair of Restaurant Brands International which owns, among other assets, Tim Hortons Inc. He was formerly president of Tim Hortons.

'It's a huge relief to finally solidify some of those details we've put so much work into," said CPL executive Paul Beirne, who became the league's first official employee in November, 2016.

"And I'm equally excited about more announcements coming down the pipe in the next few weeks."

The CPL will open some time in April 2019, likely with 10 teams, and continue play through October while wearing its maple leaf on its sleeve, and just about everywhere else.

"The driving principle is developing Canadian players, coaches and administrators; building a Canadian soccer economy," said Scott Mitchell, one of the major movers in establishing the league, and also the CEO of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats who will own the CPL's Hamilton team.

Mitchell said the Hamilton organization is currently working on a partnership "with a soccer entity, and building a great ecosystem in Hamilton soccer."

Other locales likely to have teams ready for 2019 are: Winnipeg, owned by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the CFL; the Ottawa Fury, which will play its second season in the American second tier USL in 2018; Halifax; the lower B.C. mainland and Saskatoon.

But the list of serious candidates also includes Kitchener-Waterloo, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Quebec City, Moncton, Mississauga and a second GTA franchise in either Vaughan or York Township.

The CPL will be a Tier I, or 'premier' league, making it officially the top league in the country in the eyes of the Federation Internationale de Football (FIFA) even though the three biggest Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) will continue to have their teams in Major League Soccer, the U.S.'s Tier I league.

Teams are generally required to play in their own country's Tier I league if there is one, but there are exceptions around the world, such as in Wales where teams have played in English leagues for decades because Wales didn't have its own Premier League until 25 years ago. Those teams, like the MSL teams here, were allowed to continue their existing league memberships.

The CPL will have a salary cap and while some players will make into six figures for the season, the average salary is likely to land somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000 per season.

There will also be an "import limit", restricting each team to an as-yet-unannounced number of non-domestic players.

"Most of our players will be Canadians," Beirne told The Spectator, "It's a league by Canadians for Canadians. And it's also a league of supporters for supporters."

Since, and even before, the CPL was ratified as a member of the Canadian Soccer Association (also known as Soccer Canada) last spring, local supporters' groups (SGs), including Hamilton's Barton Street Battalion, have been established in 16 different Canadian locations. Soccer SGs tend to be more involved in, and financially supportive of, their favourite franchise than most fan clubs in other sports. They will be key factors in helping publicize and market their respective CPL teams.

The CPL is in partnership with the Canadian Soccer Association, which sees the new league which views a domestic pro league as the top of its men's development pathway.

At least three provinces, including Ontario with League1, have pro-am leagues for elite players after their age-class eligibility is done and those leagues will likely provide some players for the 2019 CPL launch.

When it ratified the CPL membership last May, the CSA also granted the Hamilton and Winnipeg franchises membership, making them the first two teams in the new league.

The CSA sees the CPL as critical to building a credible National Men's Team. Canada has not qualified for the men's World Cup since 1986 and, paradoxically, since the MLS began play in this country in 2005 the Canadian men's national team's ranking plunged from 84th in the world to as low as 120th exactly one year ago. It's since rebounded strongly, but is still only 94th, despite soccer attracting the greatest number of Canadian athletes between the ages of 3 and 17.

While Canadian women - admittedly facing a smaller international pool - have won bronze medals at the last two Summer Olympics, the men struggle to hold their own at regional-level competitions.

For the better part of a year it has been speculated that the CPL was aiming for an August 2018 launch in order to take advantage of the quadrennial upsurge in soccer interest which happens right after a World Cup, which this summer will be played in Russia.

But the only two people speaking for the CPL during that time, Mitchell and Beirne, always emphasized that the league would not begin until it had every detail squarely in place for each franchise which would play that year.

Some franchises could have been ready for 2018, but it would have been a partial season with fewer teams than the 10 expected to hit the ground running in April, 2019.

The CPL also has cast its long term eye on the World Cup in 2026 when it should have a roster of a couple of at least a couple of dozen teams across the nation, likely playing on more than one tier. Beirne has already said publicly that Canadian fans should eventually expect some form of relegation/promotion process, which would be new to North American professional sport.

Canada is working with the U.S. and Mexico on a combined bid to host the 2016 World Cup, which seemed like a lock, and still should be, but dark horse Morocco is apparently making some inroads among voters.