Soccer has taken Canada by storm. Can its reign last?

Oren Weisfeld is the author of The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse.

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For generations, hockey has been at the centre of Canada’s civic life. Our forebears took to strapping on skates and playing shinny on the nearest river or pond. And tuning into Hockey Night in Canada became a reflexive ritual for many Canadians – as big of a part of our national identity and social fabric as anything else.

But there has been a potential changing of the guard in Canada’s sports landscape. NHL viewership has slumped in recent years, and the CBC’s June announcement that it would no longer air Hockey Night in Canada followed a 70-per-cent average-minute audience decline for its Saturday night games since 2014. Canada’s men’s and women’s teams lost to the United States in the gold-medal games of the 2026 Olympics.

And youth participation in hockey has been declining in the last decade and a half (although there has been a rebound from pandemic lows in the last couple of years. Hockey is now just the eighth-most popular participation sport among youth.

In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, Canadian parents faced an average yearly price tag of $3,253 for hockey in 2025– about triple the average annual cost of participating in soccer ($1,105) or basketball ($1,068). “The pattern is clear,” a recent Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities report concludes. “The sports with the broadest participation tend to be those with the lowest barriers to entry.” And the fact that hockey culture has been exposed to be rife with bullying, racism and sexual assault has not helped hockey maintain its grip on Canadian culture.

This has all presented an opportunity for other sports to gain a foothold – particularly with soccer taking centre stage at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Canada rallied around its men’s national team and displayed a level of soccer fervour that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians marched to the 13 World Cup games hosted in Toronto and Vancouver, while record numbers of TV viewers watched Canada record its first World Cup draw, its first group-stage win, its first knockout game win, and its first Round of 16 appearance. Stephen Eustáquio’s stoppage-time winner to eliminate South Africa will go down in Canadian history and inspire a new generation to pick up the sport and represent Canada on the biggest stages.

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It’s a moment that’s been decades in the making. When Pierre Trudeau introduced Canada’s multiculturalism policy in 1971, he opened the borders to immigrants from Asia, Africa and the West Indies – places where soccer and basketball are significantly more popular. Now that these new Canadians and their offspring are sending their children to youth sports, it makes sense that demand for the most affordable, accessible, and globally popular sports have surged. Around 50 per cent of Canadian children now play soccer, making it the most popular team sport in the country.

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At the same time, it’s hard not to wonder if this World Cup was a missed opportunity for Canadian soccer. As a host nation with its best roster to date, Canada Soccer had a chance to bring Canadians together in a way that only sports can and transform the country’s relationship to the sport moving forward. But after finishing second in their group with a disappointing loss to Switzerland, an Alphonso Davies-less Team Canada travelled to Houston and lost 3-0 to seventh-ranked Morocco in the Round of 16, leaving fans without a galvanizing moment to rally around. “What you could see so clearly in Houston was a young football nation: committed but inexperienced, talented but incomplete, succeeding despite the enthusiasm gap with so much of the rest of the world,” Toronto Star sports columnist Bruce Arthur wrote.

Hockey’s affordability crisis and its various scandals have created an opportunity for soccer in Canada. But does the sport have what it takes to conquer Canadian sports culture? And what will it take to get there?

Soccer is clearly not wanting for participation, but that is not the only driver of a sport’s popularity. Look at American football, for example, which is played by a tiny percentage of Canadian youth, yet draws incredible TV ratings as well as fantasy league and betting interest. “The reality is: media shapes culture, competition shapes media, and I believe … there’s a gap between the popularity of some of our sports and whether they’re getting pro-rata coverage media-wise,” Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue told The Globe. “The culture part is almost independent of participation ... It’s more correlated to the media.”

Hockey has long gotten the lion’s share of media attention in Canada, in part because we’ve been so good at it. Canadian teams have won 41 Stanley Cups since the NHL gained sole custody of the trophy in 1927. Paul Henderson’s Summit Series-winning goal to defeat the Soviet Union in 1972 brought the country together; Sidney Crosby’s “Golden Goal” at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics is the most-watched event in Canadian TV history; Connor McDavid’s sequel to beat the U.S. at the 2025 Four Nations Face-Off is not far behind. Those magical moments caused spikes in viewership and interest, creating a positive feedback loop that increases participation and media coverage.

The secret is creating those catalyzing moments in the first place – which is what Canada Soccer is now pouring resources into making happen, starting with hosting the World Cup. “The conditions for helping facilitate [growth] are driven by the national teams and their success and the TV ratings,” Mr. Blue told The Athletic. “I think what we just accomplished ... is an example of the power of this sport.”

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Canada Soccer has not been immune to scandals of its own. In 2024, it was revealed that the women’s team used drones to spy on other teams; later, the players launched a $40-million lawsuit against the national organization due to what they argue is an unfair marketing deal. But soccer in Canada is surely on the upswing. Canada’s ninth-ranked women’s team won its first gold at the 2021 Olympics behind a superstar performance from one of the best players of her generation, Christine Sinclair. And the men’s team is flush with athletes playing at the highest levels of European competition, helping it move up from 109th in the world less than a decade ago to 30th before its World Cup run.

Since stepping in as CEO in 2024, Mr. Blue has helped turn around Canada Soccer’s bottom line, with expected revenues of $62-million this year, up from $40-million in 2025 (compared to $109-million for Hockey Canada). Canada Soccer is planning on building a new national training facility, hiring more full-time youth coaches, building more residency programs, and improving the performance standards of its national teams. That’s especially important since the World Cup laid bare some of Canada’s challenges with soccer infrastructure, with only two of the 48 World Cup teams choosing to hold their training camps in Canada; it was also only able to host three knockout-stage games because of these limitations in Toronto and Vancouver. Meanwhile, as the women’s Northern Super League continues to grow, it’s unclear if there will still be a professional men’s club in Vancouver next year, or how long the Canadian Premier League can stay afloat.

It’s not perfect, but this summer’s World Cup put soccer in a much stronger place. “It’s both the expertise, and it’s the mentality of what’s possible,” head coach Jesse Marsch said after Canada’s knockout-round victory. “And that’s why when I called our players heroes, they are heroes. They’re gonna give us all the opportunity to actually build something special.”

When exactly that special moment might come remains to be seen. But something special might indeed be happening under our feet right now – just in a different sport altogether.

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As the Canadian men’s soccer team was being ousted from the World Cup in early July, the Canadian men’s basketball team was fielding its most talented roster of all time for the FIBA World Cup 2027 Americas Qualifiers in Hamilton, Ont. Canada’s team – loaded with NBA talent – trounced Puerto Rico and Jamaica by a combined 64 points. Now, with its eyes set on the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, Canada Basketball has a chance to achieve what the soccer team could not: “Gold at the World Cup, gold at the Olympics,” as head coach Gordie Herbert laid out.

The biggest reason for optimism is co-captain Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the two-time NBA MVP who grew up dreaming about representing his country on the world stage. “I call him Canada’s national treasure,” Mr. Herbert said, adding: “Better person than player.” And while the superstar point guard didn’t want to get into a war of words with Soccer Canada – “We can all excel at the same time,” he told me – Canadian basketball is a more mature product in many ways.

Thanks in large part to the Toronto Raptors’ 2019 NBA championship – a catalyzing moment that led to a massive spike in participation before the pandemic slowed it down – Canada now has a comprehensive prep school and club team ecosystem, a FIBA-sanctioned domestic men’s pro league, and a popular WNBA team in Toronto. A record number of NBA and WNBA players now hail from Canada, with the women’s national team projected to peak around 2032. Basketball is now the second-most popular team sport among Canadian youth, just after soccer. And perhaps most importantly, the national men’s team has a transformational leader capable of carrying the sport to new heights.

Unlike soccer captain Alphonso Davies, who plays for an elite European team six time zones away from Toronto, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander consistently appears on primetime cable and social media feeds as the leader of the Thunder, who won the NBA Championship in 2025 and fell just shy of making the Finals again this year. “The players that are playing our game at the highest level globally are truly visible 365 [days a year],” Canada Basketball CEO Michael Bartlett told me. “So the North American consciousness toward NBA and WNBA athletes … is a strong connection.” That’s one reason corporate sponsors are more interested in basketball than ever; Canada Basketball brought in a record $20-million in revenue in 2024.

But there remains a dissonance between basketball and the Canadian public. Canada Basketball has proven all it can on the court, including by defeating Team USA for bronze at the 2023 FIBA World Cup to qualify for its first Olympics in 24 years. But after decades of lacklustre funding, a dearth of home games, and disappointing results on the world stage, it still has work to do on getting the casual Canadian sports fan excited about the potential of a sport invented by a Canadian, James Naismith. “There’s players here that want something for their country,” general manager Rowan Barrett said after struggling to sell out Hamilton’s 18,000-seat TD Coliseum for this summer’s qualifiers. “And their country has to want it for them, too.”

Basketball has everything it needs to become Canada’s next sport. All it’s missing is a “where were you when?” moment of genuine hysteria for the country to rally around. The race for that moment is on. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into creating it. And despite hockey’s history of magical goals and all the recent soccer fervour, don’t be surprised if basketball gets there first.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to delete incorrect numbers for youth enrollment in hockey and to correct the average cost of youth participation in soccer and basketball.