Why did it take a foreign company to broadcast Canadian soccer?

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Soccer fans in Canada could be forgiven for thinking that, lately, the off-field action has been more interesting than anything happening on the pitch. In the past few months alone, two blockbuster lawsuits turned an already astonishing story – the two senior national teams in open revolt against their federation – into one of almost comical chaos.

Last month, the women’s senior national team filed a $40-million suit against the individuals who were members of the 2018 Canada Soccer board, alleging they were negligent in allowing the federation to strike a controversial deal to license most of its commercial rights to startup company Canadian Soccer Business.

Two months earlier, CSB and its broadcast partner, Mediapro Canada, which owns the streaming service OneSoccer, had filed duelling lawsuits against each other for breach of contract. As part of the court action, CSB had claimed it would take back the rights to all of the national team games and other domestic matches that had been on OneSoccer.

With six months to go before the Paris Olympics, it looked as if Canadians wouldn’t be able to watch any of the national women’s team tuneup games – nor any of the other matches CSB owned the rights to, such as the men’s qualifiers for this summer’s Copa America, the CONCACAF W Gold Cup, or Canadian Premier League games.

But this week, some rare good news: CSB and Mediapro, whose parent company is based in Barcelona, announced they had dropped their weapons and were working toward a resolution, telling The Canadian Press that “OneSoccer will remain the home of Canadian soccer.”

The Canadian Premier League season, which kicks off next Saturday, will air on the channel. So will this weekend’s SheBelieves Cup, where the national women’s team hopes to set the tone in advance of Paris.

We don’t yet know what the permanent shape will be of the détente between CSB and Mediapro. But the issues highlighted by the statements of claim filed in court – including OneSoccer’s lack of success in getting carried by most of the major cable companies in this country – haven’t gone away.

Adding to the pressure, Mediapro Canada’s parent company has been in turmoil: After a debt restructuring in 2022, the chief executive officer and co-founder left last fall and the majority shareholder, Hong Kong-based Southwind Media, was mulling a sale of the entire global operation. Industry speculation is that it will pull out of Canada.

Mediapro may not have done as much for grassroots Canadian soccer as it had hoped, but it’s certainly done more than any Canadian broadcaster. Before it launched OneSoccer in 2019, there were generally two ways that Canadians could watch their men’s or women’s national teams: Either Canada Soccer could pay a hefty fee to a broadcaster to produce and air the games, or fans could search the internet for low-quality pirated foreign streams.

OneSoccer – and, frankly, the drastically improved performances of the national squads – helped prove that Canadians would tune in to watch our women and men wearing the Maple Leaf, even outside of the Olympics and FIFA events.

Still, not everyone shared that vision. OneSoccer licensed more than a dozen of the men’s national team World Cup qualifying games to Sportsnet in the fall of 2021 and winter of 2022, pulling in huge audiences for that thrilling run. But when OneSoccer tried to use those viewership numbers to prove it deserved a spot on cable dials across the country – which is still how the majority of Canadians watch TV programming – it was rebuffed. The cable companies, wary of raising prices in a cord-cutting era, insisted they couldn’t afford to package the channel with their existing sports offerings.

That lack of success was not just OneSoccer’s loss. When sports teams sell their TV rights, yes, they want to get a big fee, but they also have to keep an eye on the size of the potential audience they could reach, to maximize their sponsorship revenue. That’s why pro teams increasingly are talking about what’s known as audience “reach,” trying to ensure that a good chunk of their games remain on broadcast TV, where the greatest number of potential viewers are still found. (That’s also one reason Roger Goodell insisted in February that the Super Bowl would never become a streaming-only event for as long as he is NFL commissioner.)

So, when OneSoccer couldn’t get carriage on the major cable systems, except for Telus, it meant lower potential sponsorship revenue for Canadian Soccer Business – and Canada Soccer itself, which, despite reports to the contrary, still owns the rights to several categories of commercial sponsorships.

OneSoccer complained to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, arguing that Rogers Communications Inc. was acting anti-competitively by refusing to bundle its channel in the same way it does the company’s own Sportsnet specialty service. In Rogers’s response, the cable giant noted that its channels carry so little soccer that its behaviour couldn’t be considered anti-competitive.

Bell Media’s TSN, Canada’s other 800-pound sports TV gorilla, is hardly better. Sure, it airs more Canadian national soccer team matches, but only the marquee events that arrive on the wings of global hype, such as FIFA’s men’s and women’s World Cups.

Last year, the CRTC ruled that Rogers had, indeed, given undue preference to itself. It ordered the companies to come up with a resolution. But no carriage agreement materialized, and OneSoccer never succeeded in getting carried on other cable lineups, either.

Canada’s broadcast system was built to protect Canadian companies – and those who work for and with them – from foreign competition. For decades, it enabled Canadian voices to be heard, to not be drowned out in our own home by the cacophony from the other side of our southern border. But it also meant that private gatekeepers were able to dictate what Canadians could or couldn’t watch. And while the streaming revolution has helped to disrupt that order, the system still favours incumbents.

Canadians shouldn’t have had to wait for a foreign company to show us what we were missing on our own soccer pitch. Still, having seen the possibilities, it would be nice to think Canadian broadcasters might be able to take it from here.