Canada is not ready for the FIFA World Cup

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Eamon Donoghue is a Vancouver-based journalist who worked for The Irish Times, as well as Ireland’s state broadcaster, RTÉ.

I didn’t know too much about Moroccan soccer or its fans before the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Their team took the tournament by storm to become the first Arab nation ever to reach a semi-final. It felt like the matches were being played in Casablanca, with a sea of red and a wall of unrelenting chants. You could feel the rhythm of the drums in your chest, see children hoisted on shoulders waving flags. It was as if the fans were breathing life into their team.

The world didn’t just find an underdog to rally behind – it was given a powerful window into a country and its people. Their passion, their pride and the sheer emotion of what it meant to be on that stage. World Cups are often remembered for iconic goals, legendary players cementing their legacies, and inevitable controversies and injustices – on and off the field. But for me, moments like this linger just as much – when it feels like a privilege to be there.

This time next year the biggest event on Earth will have come and gone in Canada. While the national team will hopefully deliver an underdog story on the pitch, off it I don’t think the country is ready.

Are most Canadians aware of just how big the World Cup is? As a journalist I’ve worked at a number of the world’s most prominent sporting events and aside from maybe the Olympics, nothing comes close to the largest soccer tournament in the world, which will kick off across Canada, Mexico and the United States next June.

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Soccer is by a distance the most widely played and watched sport on the planet and the World Cup has been its showpiece event since 1930. More than 127 million viewers watched this year’s Super Bowl, in comparison to the more than five billion people who will watch the World Cup action unfold. The average global live audience of the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 was 175 million viewers per game.

Over 650,000 combined out-of-province visitors are expected to flood through Vancouver and Toronto for next summer’s tournament. In comparison, 250,000 visitors attended the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

From June 12, when Toronto hosts the country’s first ever World Cup match, to July 7, when the round of 16 comes to Vancouver, both cities and the people living in them are set to experience seismic change.

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For a start, it will mean a month or more of sold-out hotel rooms. In Vancouver, where I live, there are just 13,000 rooms spread across 78 hotels within the municipality, but more than 350,000 visitors are expected in the city for the matches. An additional hotel tax introduced in 2023 to help fund the costs of hosting the tournament has increased prices, but a lot of these rooms are already fully booked out for those key months.

Trust me: You can expect it to be almost impossible to get a table at any restaurant anywhere near the stadiums on match nights. Long queues for bars filing onto the street. Booking well in advance becomes essential, while prices are always heavily inflated for most basic services, and public-facing businesses become overwhelmed very quickly.

Then there’s the intense rush for tickets building to a crescendo on match days, the thorough and strict security presence across the city, and the pressure on transport services. (A controversial priority bus lane proposed for Dufferin St. in Toronto will hardly change things.)

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There’s also the party atmosphere which comes with the wonderful mix of different cultures and nationalities, often on a trip of a lifetime to support their team. Although depending on the countries in question and given the nature of soccer fan culture, this can also turn sour. At Euro 2016 in France, Russian and English hooligans clashed in scenes which show the darker side of the sport and which nobody will want a repeat of.

This all amounts to having a major impact on the lives of Canadians living in these cities or looking to visit for the games. It feels like Vancouver and Toronto are still caught in the warm-up jog, while cities in Mexico and the United States are already into the final sprint. For example, in Mexico City, authorities have boosted mobility spending by approximately $500-million, funding metro upgrades, new cable-car lines, and corridor improvements around key sites like Estadio Aztec. Just $6.6-million has been earmarked for transportation enhancements in Toronto so far.

FIFA has been delivering these tournaments for so long that we can be assured the World Cup will happen, on time, and be a historic moment for Canada. However, in a year’s time, in a decade, in 40 years, will we be able to look back and say it had a huge impact on Canadian soccer, sport, culture and everyday life? Or will there be a feeling of missed opportunity?

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A Deloitte/FIFA impact study estimates a $3.8-billion economic output boost for Canada, along with a $2-billion contribution to GDP, $1.3-billion in labour income, $700-million in public revenue, and the creation and preservation of 24,100 jobs.

But it doesn’t matter how many jobs are created, or how many tourists show up, if these cities aren’t fundamentally improved after the final whistle blows.

The Canada Line connecting Vancouver International Airport to downtown, upgrades to the Sea-to-Sky Highway, the addition of the Vancouver Convention Centre, the construction of the Vancouver Olympic Village and its partial conversion into social housing are all legacies of the 2010 Winter Olympics. The Toronto 2015 Pan Am delivered the Canary District, another community with affordable housing and transportation upgrades. The Calgary 1988 Winter Olympics provided world-class sporting infrastructure such as Canada Olympic Park, the Olympic Oval (which was the first covered speed-skating oval in North America), as well as nearby Canmore Nordic Centre. They are all still in active use and helped spark the growth of Canadian winter sport excellence.

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The World Cup will showcase soccer’s power as both spectacle and economic catalyst, but its greatest impact should be unlocking the full potential of the sport in Canada and supporting the emergence of a thriving soccer industry.

The vehicle for this looks to be the Canadian Premier League. Having a national league was quite rightly a key condition for hosting this World Cup, and before 2019 Canada was the only developed nation in the world without a domestic tier one league.

Clubs such as Vancouver FC are now operating as the missing link in a pathway whereby kids go from grassroots soccer, through university soccer, into the professional game and then beyond to become the future stars of the national team, fuelling the entire ecosystem with their transfer fees and success.

However the infrastructure is simply not there right now, nor the support or vision it seems, to allow these Canadian Premier League clubs to facilitate the potential explosion in the game which is about to come.

The best young Canadian talent for too long have had to attract the attention of clubs in the MLS or other foreign leagues, instead of having the time to develop and mature in their own domestic system in front of local fans of the game. The World Cup should help change that.

Soccer is unquestionably the most popular sport in the world and the biggest competition in the world is coming here. Yet Canada risks missing the chance to turn this moment into lasting progress. The dots are all there. It just doesn’t feel like they’ve been connected.