Canada's Alphonso Davies kicks the ball past Mexican defenders during a Concacaf Nations League semifinal match at SoFi Stadium. in Inglewood, Calif., on Mar 20.Alex Gallardo/Reuters
Cheating at the Olympics didn’t have that much impact on Canada’s soccer program. A few people were jettisoned, but after releasing a report on the matter so redacted that it read like a John Ashbery poem, Canada Soccer moved on. All it took was a few news cycles to wash its sporting sins clean.
This one might be different.
On Wednesday, Alphonso Davies’s European club, Bayern Munich, announced that he would undergo surgery for a torn ACL. He suffered the injury early in Canada’s third-place game against the United States last Sunday at the Nations League. The club expects said Davies will be out for “a lengthy period of time.” That could be as long as a year.
There’s also no guarantee that a player like Davies, one who relies on a combination of power and speed, will fully recover. It’s not a career-ender, but it is sometimes a career impeder.
Immediately after Sunday’s 2-1 win, Canadian assistant coach Mauro Biello seemed to suggest Davies started the game injured.
“It was a knock, and he felt something. He just didn’t want to risk it at that point,” Biello said. “He was banged up from the [previous] game against Mexico.”
At the time, with Biello giving the impression that Davies was fine, that wasn’t a big deal. On Wednesday, it became one.
“On Saturday night, the expectation was he would not be in the [starting lineup]. As a captain, I feel he was pressured to start the game by the coach,” Davies’s agent, Nedal Huoseh, told OneSoccer after Bayern’s announcement. “He ended up playing and look what happened.”
A while later, Canada Soccer returned fire.
“Canada’s soccer coaches and experienced medical staff are true professionals and have always prioritized player safety and well-being,” a statement from the national body read, in part. “Anything suggesting otherwise is untrue.”
Absent Davies’s commentary, it’s impossible to know who said what to whom, or what exactly “pressured” means. Does it mean someone asked him? Or did someone tell him?
Marsch told the Canadian Press that Davies “had been nursing a little bit of an injury.” Evidently, it was a little more than a little. It may have been a lot.
Regardless, the babysitting rule applies. If someone gives you their baby, you must do everything in your power to return them in the same condition in which you received them.
That means you don’t break a guy so that he can play in a third-place game at a nothing tournament with zero international implications. If he winces getting off the bus, if he squints while he’s doing warm-up windmills, you pull him.
A loss is surmountable. Being without Davies when it counts isn’t.
The first comparison that leaps to mind is Golden State bringing Kevin Durant back early from a calf injury to play against the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 NBA Finals. Durant promptly tore his Achilles.
Being “banged up” and “a little bit injured” is not the same as having been out for weeks, but the Nations League isn’t the NBA Finals. The two things are a wash. Based on Biello and Marsch’s comments, as well as the outcome, Canada made the wrong choice.
The good news – if that’s the right word – is that this country doesn’t have to qualify for its own World Cup. The bad news is that they are now on the outs with their best player.
It was one thing for Huoseh to call out Canada. It was another to call out Marsch.
Marsch has no good options here. He can’t get into a fight with his best player, but he’s already in one.
They could wheel Davies out of whatever German rehab centre he’s at now, Marsch could sit in his lap and they could declare their mutual admiration, and it’s not change the impression that coach and player are at war.
The other players will have to choose whose side they’re on. That’s just how it works. Two camps will form within the larger one.
In the case of the Paris Olympics, give Canada one thing – it stuck together. A trio of coaches were excised, but everybody else hung on to the ‘Nothing to see here’ script like flotsam.
No such luck in this instance. Canada Soccer has already sided with its coach and his staff, putting it at odds with Davies.
Somewhere over the course of sports history this kind of falling out has turned out fine in the end, but I’m hard pressed to recall an example.
A nimble sports organization might be able to head the problem off before it mutates. Based on history, Canada Soccer is about as nimble as an aircraft carrier. When it eventually makes a move, it’s 50/50 that it will discover some PR rocks to run the ship up on.
Compounding the awkwardness, Davies just signed a huge, new contract with Bayern. Now that Canada’s cost it the services of a $25-million-a-year player, how anxious will the Germans be to trust it with their baby again? And how determined will Huoseh be to give Bayern what it wants?
Nobody’s going to keep a healthy player out of a World Cup, but until then? Canada plays nothing but forgettable friendlies, and every game matters at Bayern Munich. The next time we see Davies in the Maple Leaf could be shortly before the 2026 World Cup kicks off.
There are worse scenarios. Davies could be grievously injured. He could quit Canada in a huff. The rest of the team could launch a boycott.
But though not that, this is still a terrible outcome one year from a home World Cup. This story will run and run, particularly if Davies has the same impression of what happened as his agent.
It reminds us once again that while Canada is good at soccer and getting better, we’re still not particularly bright about soccer.