Anne-Marie Seessle, a Germany fan in Brampton, Ont., on Sunday. Ms. Seessle, who also heads a local Bayern Munich fan club, supports Germany to stay connected to her family roots.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
Mohammad Abdou’s phone began buzzing the moment FIFA announced the full 2026 World Cup schedule, revealing that Egypt will have one match in Vancouver and two in nearby Seattle.
As director of the Association of Egyptians in Vancouver, Mr. Abdou is in many group chats connecting hundreds of members of the country’s diaspora. Throughout Saturday, they exchanged screenshots about the news, as they discussed which opponents Egypt will be facing and whether it would be possible to get tickets.
“For us, soccer is something like a second religion,” Mr. Abdou said in an interview on Sunday. “So it was really exciting. All of the WhatsApp groups, from morning until like midnight, it was all about soccer.”
That flurry of chatter and excitement was a common phenomenon across the dozen diaspora communities that learned this weekend that their favourite soccer nations will be playing on Canadian soil at this summer’s World Cup. The full schedule of the expanded 48-nation, 104-game tournament was announced Saturday in Washington.
Canada has never played host to a World Cup before. Next year, as co-host with the United States and Mexico, the country will be putting on 13 games – seven in Vancouver and six in Toronto.
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Team Canada will open its campaign for the cup on June 12 at Toronto’s BMO Field against a yet-to-be-determined winner of a European playoff. After that, the team heads west to face Qatar and Switzerland at Vancouver’s BC Place on June 18 and June 24th, respectively.
Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Ghana, Panama, Germany, the Ivory Coast, Croatia and Senegal will also play games in Canada.
Mr. Abdou said Liverpool forward Mohamed Salah, who is playing for Egypt, will be a big draw for his community. He noted that children and adults alike idolize the Egyptian soccer legend.
His association plans to rent a hall with a capacity of hundreds so that people can gather there when Egypt faces New Zealand on June 21.
Anne-Marie Seessle, 38, is the chairwoman of Südkurve Toronto, the local FC Bayern Munich supporters’ group, and a lifelong German national team fan. Her grandparents, like many other German immigrants, left their war-ravaged country in the early 1950s to seek opportunity in Canada, and she says her father and uncle instilled a love of the sport in her at an early age.
Ms. Seessle says she cried all day when she secured tickets to the tournament, having dreamed since childhood of seeing Germany play in a World Cup match.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
She managed to secure four tickets from an online reseller on Saturday for the match between Germany against the Ivory Coast next June, at $1,055 each.
“My whole day just went into a whirlwind of crying from emotions, from happiness,” Ms. Seessle said in an interview, calling it a “No. 1 bucket list item” to see Germany play in a World Cup. (She adds that she will be cheering for Canada – whose roster includes Bayern Munich star Alphonso Davies – as well.)
Toronto lawyer Ivan Grbesic, 50, drove 19 hours from Zagreb to Paris to see the Croatian national team play in the semifinals of the 1998 World Cup. So he says he is looking forward to a shorter trip next year when the Vatreni – or “the fiery,” as Croatians call their national squad – face Panama at BMO Field in the 2026 World Cup.
Mr. Grbesic, a father of four, was born in Sudbury to immigrant parents from Croatia. His father, like many Croatian immigrants who arrived in the decades after the Second World War, many fleeing Yugoslavian communism, worked for nickel miner Inco. Families such as his nurtured a Croatian identity in their offspring through folk dancing, Croatian school, and local Croatian soccer clubs.
The Toronto area, now home to close to 40,000 people of Croatian descent, is one of that country’s largest diaspora communities. Croatia’s coach, Zlatko Dalic, has said he expects an advantage in Toronto, with stands full of cheering Croatian-Canadians.
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But Mr. Grbesic says those gathering to watch – and likely paying hundreds of dollars or more per ticket – will be part of much more than a sporting event. He said Croatian-Canadians his age remember being told in school that their country didn’t exist. Seeing the national team take the pitch in Canada in a World Cup will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, he said.
“For us, the Vatreni, as we refer to the Croatian national team, they represent our history, our resilience and our identity as people, and seeing them playing live in Toronto will be profoundly emotional,” Mr. Grbesic said. “It brings to mind our parents who emigrated, Croatia’s struggle for independence, and it gives our children a chance to experience their heritage in a living, powerful way.”
Gabriel Odartei, the executive secretary of the Ghanaian-Canadian Association of Ontario, said he thought ticket prices would keep many in his diaspora community of around 20,000 from attending the country’s World Cup opening-round match against Panama at BMO Field.
“It’s going to be very, very challenging for many people,” he said, adding that ticket prices online for the game were in the $500-to-$800 range. He said he might prefer to watch the game somewhere outside the stadium, where he can be surrounded by friends and other Ghanaian-Canadian fans.
He said he expects thousands to gather, potentially in downtown Toronto’s Sankofa Square (the former Yonge-Dundas Square), if the game could be shown on a big screen. Or, as it has for past contests, the community could also congregate in the Jane Street and Wilson Avenue area in the city’s northwest, to celebrate together.
“What connects us the most is the soccer team. We have different cultural groups, different churches, but the thing that brings us all together would be our national team,” Mr. Odartei said.