Alphonso Davies controls the ball against Curacao at BC Place stadium in Vancouver on June 9.DON MACKINNON/AFP/Getty Images
If the last weekend in March marked the moment when the Canadian men’s national soccer team drew international plaudits for breaking its lengthy World Cup drought, the first weekend in June brought an entirely different sort of global recognition.
Canada players go on strike over pay dispute, was the headline on the Times of London website, with the writer going on to describe how the team’s preparations for a first World Cup in 36 years had “descended into chaos.”
The immediate result of the players’ action – the boycott of last Sunday’s exhibition game against Panama as well as the cancellation of two training sessions – does little to paint the men’s national team program as anything but a dysfunctional organization still negotiating its way out of the sport’s hinterland.
But for a team that has rarely been close to rubbing shoulders with the game’s heavyweights at the top table of world soccer since its flying visit to Mexico in 1986, it was always going to come to this, sooner or later. It’s all part of the maturation process, according to the team’s former captain.
“This is how you grow federations,” says Julian de Guzman, now a soccer analyst with TSN. “You see these federations that play at the World Cups all the time, they’ve had to go through this at one point. So I think this is something that’s only going to make the organization much stronger, more powerful, and successful down the road, and you’ll start to see more positive outcomes.”
The start of those positive outcomes took place Thursday night, when the Canadian men took the field at Vancouver’s B.C. Place in front of 17,216 fans and routed Curacao in their CONCACAF Nations League opener 4-0 on the occasion of their first game at home since clinching a spot in Qatar for November’s World Cup.
However, the players have yet to reach agreement on a new deal with the Canadian Soccer Association, and just took on legal representation to help them get one. One of the main sticking points is player compensation, with the players asking for 40 per cent of prize money, while the federation has offered 30 per cent. In addition, the players, who will each receive two tickets for each game in Qatar, want the CSA to establish a comprehensive friends-and-family package, to help their loved ones get to the World Cup.
That prize money began to materialize the moment the team qualified for Qatar back in March, with each of the 32 teams taking part in the World Cup scheduled to receive US$9-million just for getting there. The total pool of prize money available for the 2022 World Cup is US$440-million, according to world governing body FIFA, with the winning federation slated to receive US$42-million.
While the money is a lot different than it was the first time Canada went to the World Cup, it’s not the first time the men’s program has been through such a pay dispute.
“We went through this, ironically enough, in ‘86, we had our moment but it never got to the stage where there was a threat to not play,” says Bob Lenarduzzi, who played in all three of Canada’s games in 1986. “And primarily, what we went through was because it hadn’t happened before.”
Much like today, the 1986 squad hired a lawyer to resolve its differences with the federation. Lenarduzzi says that was important for a couple of reasons.
“The deal that we ended up doing when I look back on it now, it actually was fair, given the time that we were in,” he says. “… so I really feel like that’s what needs to happen now. You can get to the point where you’re not trying to gouge but you’re getting your fair shake.”
Lenarduzzi, who is now a club liaison officer for the Vancouver Whitecaps, went on to coach the Canadian men’s national team on two separate occasions, guiding the team to within one win of automatic qualification for the 1994 World Cup in the United States. Unfortunately, a 2-1 loss to Mexico at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium dropped Canada into a two-legged playoff with Australia, where Lenarduzzi said the players had another standoff with the CSA.
“I remember sitting in the hotel, and we were getting ready to go to training and we didn’t go to training because something similar was happening,” he says. “But in the end, it got resolved.”
One of the principal problems Lenarduzzi points to this time around is the 36 years between Canada’s involvement in the men’s World Cup. By way of example, he points to the United States, where the men’s soccer program has qualified for every World Cup bar one since 1990.
As a result, that resulting FIFA prize money for World Cup qualification isn’t an unexpected windfall, but an injection of cash that makes its way into the federation’s budgets and is apportioned appropriately, so there isn’t a mad squabble when it lands on the doorstep.
As Julian de Guzman put it, if someone were to look at the CSA’s 2022 budget last year, “I’m pretty sure they didn’t have that line item in there that indicated a World Cup in Qatar.”
The Americans have also led the way when it comes to pay equity between their men’s and women’s national teams. The long-term dispute between the women’s team and the U.S. Soccer Federation finally came to a head in February with a landmark court decision that both men’s and women’s team players would be paid equally.
In among the other demands put forward by the Canadian men in last weekend’s publicly released letter was that both men’s and women’s programs would receive an equal “percentage of prize money.” The Canadian women, the reigning Olympic champions who have been involved in their own negotiations with the CSA over pay since January, quickly released a statement pointing out that equal percentages are not equal pay.
By way of comparison, the total prize money available at the 2019 Women’s World Cup was US$30-million total, with the winning U.S. squad taking home US$4-million.
A text message to Canadian national women’s team captain Christine Sinclair seeking comment was not replied to.
Given the negative headlines that the men’s team generated by cancelling the game against Panama at the 11th hour – having already had to draft in Panama as a last-minute replacement following the original, misguided decision to play Iran – one former national team player thinks the men need to embrace the equal-pay situation.
“In my opinion, the sooner that they come out and make a statement that one of the agreements has to be equal pay, we agree with it, we’re behind it, [the better],” says Craig Forrest, who made more than 100 starts as a goalkeeper in the English Premier League. “Because in my opinion, I think it’s coming anyway, [and if they don’t embrace it] I think the public opinion is going to crush them.”
Current national-team star Alphonso Davies, who scored twice in Thursday’s win over Curacao in his first game for the national team since last November, has no doubt about what he and his teammates need to do.
“The women are a good team, they went to the Olympics and won the Olympics, it’s fair to them and us as well to split equally,” he said Thursday.
That opinion is seconded by de Guzman, who says it’s just the way things should be in the modern game, referencing the women’s world-record crowd of 91,648 set at Barcelona’s Camp Nou in April for a women’s UEFA Champions League game.
“I think it’s a new movement that’s happening. Not just in football, but just in our normal way of life, right?” he says. “You have to include everyone and, you know, both men and women represent the same badge.”