Canadian National Soccer Team player Christine Sinclair, centre, prepares to appear before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in Ottawa, along with teammates Sophie Schmidt, Janine Beckie, and Quinn, on March 9.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
On the one hand, you had four of the biggest soccer stars in the country. On the other, the Conservative MP from Sarnia-Lambton. It wasn’t really a fair fight.
“Does Sport Canada fund Soccer Canada?” asked the MP, Marilyn Gladu.
The players, including Christine Sinclair, had come to Parliament Hill to give it to their bosses at, ahem, Canada Soccer. They weren’t prepared to write a backgrounder on federal sports funding.
The players looked at each other for a long time before one of them, Janine Beckie, replied, “I don’t think we know the answer to that.”
“Well, I know,” Gladu said. “It’s $2.3-million. My problem is this. We have a feminist prime minister …”
And you can sort fill in the rest for yourself. This is how football players become the football.
Another Tory asked them about the “disgusting” treatment by our current government. A Liberal wanted to ask if sex assault is a problem particular to soccer. The Bloc Québécois guy wanted to argue with himself over who is Canada’s greatest athlete – Sinclair or Mikael Kingsbury. An NDP member understood that this is all “heavy,” but “the power is behind you.”
A lot of people who didn’t read the memo making speeches. A lot more engaged in shameless fanboying. That said, it had its charms. The politicians didn’t get soccer, the soccer players didn’t get politics, but everyone agreed to pretend to talk past each other for two hours. It was a wonderful example of the complex web of civility and incomprehension that keeps this country together.
Mostly, the exchange took the form of complaints. Complaints about Canada Soccer, complaints about the government, complaints about the translation headphones.
Some of those complaints – that the women’s national team can’t afford an a-la-carte postpractice massage buffet – seem like small beer.
Others – that Canada Soccer’s current broadcast and marketing deal with both national teams underwrites a national professional league that is men only – are more substantive.
But mostly what you were thinking as you watched was, ‘How did it get to this?’ This isn’t a cause. It’s a pay dispute.
To cover up that fact, a lot of time was given over to talking about “the youth.”
“So many people watching [today],” one questioner said. “So many young people watching.”
Why? Are their TVs broken? Is ParlVu the only channel the youth get now?
This has never been about the youth, whoever they are. This is about adults getting their cut. This is a faculty-lounge war over the research budget. Meanwhile, back at headquarters, the university blew the research budget.
How’d this happen? Simple. It isn’t villainy. It’s incompetence. And not just any incompetence. The sort of breathtaking incompetence that is only possible when you put volunteer cheerleaders in charge of a sports organization.
It’s possible someone is completely in the right here (though I suspect everyone is varying degrees of wrong). Regardless, worrying about how much money professional athletes have access to in order that they may kick balls or shoot pucks seems very 2012 – back when money was free.
Now that real life has intruded, the idea that someone might not be getting the vital number of chiropractic adjustments during training camp does not outrage me. Instead, hearing about it gives me the powerful desire to lie face down on the ground.
Are these really our most pressing problems? Is this what we as a country want to spend our diminishing supply of useful attention on? If I wanted to watch more sports labour action, I’d join a union softball team.
Three hours before the committee met on Thursday, Canada Soccer released its latest offer. Unlike the several million press releases that preceded it, this one included some hard numbers.
Cynical? Absolutely. But isn’t this why the teams have been agitating? To bully their bosses into blinking?
“Disrespectful” is how player Janine Beckie described it to the committee.
Proof that you have effectively leveraged the situation is what I’d call it.
Two takeaways from that offer – Canada Soccer has committed to pay men’s and women’s players equally; and it says it wants to reopen the suspect deal that outsourced most of its earning potential to a third party called Canadian Soccer Business.
There’s no mention of where the money’s coming from to pay for this largesse, but this is at least the framework for a deal. Were I on a national team, I’d call that a win.
But oh no. Ring the bells and bang the drums. Our mourning dirge will play on.
There was a moment when this particular battle over the spoils seemed urgent and compelling, but it’s long since passed.
Here is the bottom line that people who live in the real world understand – your job is not a vocation. It’s also not a sinecure.
You have a right to fair treatment. You do not have a right to have things exactly as you would like them.
You also have every right to fight your corner, but careful with that. People have their own problems. Yours get boring in a hurry. At the moment, Canadian soccer is at risk of boring people back to hockey.
There’s also the issue of entitlement. Playing for your country isn’t a job. It’s a privilege. Somehow that’s gotten turned around here. If you don’t want to wear the national colours on the world stage until your demands are met, someone with fewer demands is champing to take your place.
This has been like watching a rock star complain about the sound equipment. We get it. You’re a perfectionist and you love your craft. You want to show your best. You want to be taken seriously. You also want to make a bunch more money. “Set up for success,” was the euphemism Beckie used on that front.
But all the rest of us showed up here to be entertained, not lectured. Either do the gig or don’t do the gig or negotiate or strike or rile up another bunch of politicians looking to advance their own agendas. Just don’t mistake our admiration for your craft as an interest in your personal finances.