The surprising semi-final showing this month of the Canadian men’s soccer team at the COPA America tournament, and the consistent excellence of the women’s team, suggest even greater things are ahead in the sport for our country.
It makes sense. For a quarter-century now, more boys and girls have been enrolled in soccer than in hockey in this country. And the gap is widening. The sport is safer than absorbing body checks each shift – headers notwithstanding – and judging from the world’s most successful teams, you get to roll on the ground writhing in mock agony when someone breathes on you.
But the idiosyncrasies of politics have a way of intersecting with popular activities in unhealthy ways. Rather than build from the ground up over, politicians prefer to buy in at the priciest, shiniest point to celebrate.
We will see evidence of this in two years, when the World Cup comes to town for seven games. Vancouver will be one of 16 sites for a tournament spread across the U.S., Mexico and the Toronto and Vancouver Canadian markets. Rather than pour worthwhile money into an infrastructure for a sport, we are paying premium prices for the spectacle of performances.
You would never gamble your household economy on the extraordinary expense and risky return that Vancouver will in playing footsie for footie with FIFA, the kingpins of the sport to whom we will bow for months on end in the summer of 2026.
At a municipal and provincial level, we seem mesmerized, indoctrinated and manipulated into believing that it is a good thing to invite hundreds of thousands of hard-partiers to town – that we can actually make money out of what ought to be at least a $600-million expenditure, that we can re-attract $1 billion of tourism down the road. At least the province’s latest estimates – costs of up to $581 million, losses as little as $100 million – admits this isn’t at first blush a money-maker.
The mayor of Vancouver, Ken Sim, predicts the publicity and impact will be like “30 to 40 Super Bowls” at once and a “no-brainer.” I respect Sim as a good acquaintance, but I question his comparison of us as one of 16 markets for the tournament to being one of one sites as the nexus of the NFL’s championship game. We’ll be on worldwide TV for two hours, seven of 104 times, squeezed in wall-to-wall for the viewing audience. As for the no-brainer reference – well, yes, if you use the less common, less positive, second interpretation of the term, Sim is correct.
We will tart up a stadium that deserves to be torn down, furnishing it with better suites for the soccer sponsors and aristocracy and real grass that the BC Lions will likely grind into mulch.
We will, according to the province, draw 350,000 fans to Vancouver, which suggests very few locals will see the games live. And not to generalize too much, because I am an avid follower of our Whitecaps, but soccer fans are not renowned for winning tourist congeniality contests.
We will see the city armed by all sorts of security forces (sanctioned and not), riven with Town Cars, strangled by street closures, choked by booked restaurants, for weeks before, during and after. We will spend our money on entertaining people we will likely not see again.
The latest FIFA rankings have Canada at 48th in the world, so there is almost assuredly no 2010 Olympic Golden Goal coming in 2026. More than likely, we will feel wonderfully to see our country back in the World Cup as a step toward international respectability. For the time being we need to love the game without investing in the outcome (as Drake did, betting $300,000 on Canada against Argentina in the COPA semi-final). We’re rather like the Austrian hockey team, seemingly chuffed just to be in with the big boys.
The budgets will assuredly grow between now and audit time, but some numbers we do have some sense of: we had a record high $7.9-billion provincial deficit in the recent fiscal year and will have a $7.7-billion deficit this year and a $6.3-billion deficit in the year we host the games.
The government has no plan to produce prosperity, so in household economy terms, the World Cup is like throwing a party when you can’t put food on the table. It is also an enormous drain on our talent that might be better applied to a more sustainable activity. The World Cup will come and go, forever, but the bills will be ours to keep.
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism.
