Canada coach Jesse Marsch savours his team's 1-0 win over South Africa in the World Cup round of 32 last Sunday.JESSIE ALCHEH/Reuters
If Canada’s run in this World Cup ends on Saturday, it might be remembered for a few things. The opening game in Toronto; the horror injury to Ismaël Koné; the winning goal by Stephen Eustáquio.
However, the moment that has undoubtedly made the biggest impression on the most people was Jesse Marsch’s “Canadian heroes” speech. This is the one the head coach delivered on the field, in front of cameras, after the team beat South Africa. That created a global conversation about showboating – something usually reserved for participants of the game, not their adult minders.
Marsch came to the Canadian set-up with a reputation as a soccer versus football sort of person. If you like soccer, you may like him. If instead you follow football, Marsch makes your head hurt.
When he coached Leeds – still the biggest job he’s had – Marsch was run out of town on a rail. Owing to his very American tendency to talk the language of self-improvement as the club was tunnelling its way through the bottom of the Premier League, his name remains a punchline in Britain.
It is hard not to see Canada’s run here as Marsch’s revenge on all the European traditionalists who sneer at him. Clearly, he’s making the most of it. Carlo Ancelotti would be more likely to walk the sidelines in a thong than give a speech the way Marsch gave it.
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Maybe it’s just a pleasant side effect that all of this preening has made Marsch – not Alphonso Davies or anyone else – the actual star of Canada’s 2026 World Cup team. Is that a good thing?
Marsch obviously thinks so. He thinks it so hard that he has gone meta about it.
“I know that as Americans we get a certain rap for being boisterous, for being arrogant, for being outwardly vocal, and I know that in many ways that does describe me, and people love to describe me that way,” Marsch said after South Africa. “I don’t give a shit.”
In other words, he has considered the ways in which other people consider him, and after all that consideration, considers them right, not that he cares. All I can say is that I’m completely convinced. It’s the “love to describe me” line that gives it away.
Who are these people who do that? You coach soccer in Canada. Until three weeks ago, the number of Canadians who could pick you out of a lineup wouldn’t fill a Loblaws.
Obviously, these people are others elsewhere. Brits. Americans. Assorted cosmopolitan football elites and other enemies of progress.
But Marsch is showing them now. That’s the point, isn’t it? Giving speeches on the field, where no one would do that, and getting away with it. For Marsch, Canada isn’t an end. It’s a means.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. It’s not like Glen Sather did it all for the greater glory of Edmonton. A coach need not feel about the place he represents as do the people he represents it on behalf of. It’s the fans’ job to care. The coach’s job is to win.
Except there is something about Marsch’s rapid-onset Canadiana that feels off. It has great length and width, but is shallow as a puddle.
Marsch, a longtime Major League Soccer midfielder, juggles a ball at Canada's training session in Houston on Friday, the eve of the knockout clash with Morocco.Ashley Landis/The Associated Press
The other day Marsch was bragging about being in commune with Wayne Gretzky – “Wayne texts me daily.” This suggests while Marsch has crammed O Canada, he’s not exactly current on contemporary Canadian issues.
That wouldn’t matter if he didn’t invoke them all the time, but he does. In his prematch presser on Friday, Marsch could not help himself but repeatedly reference Canada’s “national character.”
Upon arriving in his new job, he waded into the Canada versus Donald Trump debate. It won him a lot of early fans. Having scored the points for doing so, he never did it again. You’d say you can’t blame him – nobody else in sports wants to take Trump on either. Except that Marsch created that expectation.
If you want to be outspoken on behalf of the country, feel free. If not, stop talking about the meaning of being Canadian. Stop repeating the hoariest clichés about us – our kindness, our openness. Those are nice things to say, but nobody enjoys being lectured about who they are by someone who learned about them via quick Google search.
We’re used to this happening the other way around – Canadians who move south and become more American than Americans. Having that card played back on us is disorienting. At first, you feel flattered. As it goes on, less so.
You’re starting to get how much the average Londoner likes it when one of us moves over there for a summer job and, three weeks after landing, starts saying things like, “Innit?”
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Marsch thinks his team are “Canadian heroes.” Okay, sure. Name three others, and Wayne Gretzky better not be one of them.
It need be said that none of this matters if Marsch wins on Saturday. Winning creates in people a deep need to read the sunniest motivations on to your approach.
Winning also acquits Marsch of the charge that he overshadowed his players. He wasn’t hogging the spotlight. He was protecting his men. Of course, it made people angry. That was the point. And maybe it is.
But if Canada loses to Morocco on Saturday, there will be a necessary consideration of how Marsch handled himself here, just as there was about John Herdman after the World Cup in 2022. That’s what happens when you make yourself the story.
Herdman had the same approach – he was Canada’s biggest soccer star, and worked hard to maintain his lead. Whenever anyone doubted him on that, he’d say it again and again, always in front of cameras, and with great earnestness. People loved him for that. Until they didn’t. Then they wanted him gone.
Marsch is playing with the same forces of the Canadian psyche. He’s pointed out the problem himself – Canadians don’t like too much boisterousness. We don’t dig arrogance.
It can be fun if it works, à la Brad Marchand. But once it doesn’t, this country turns on you quick. Ask everyone who’s been prime minister for the last hundred years.
That’s another thing Marsch hasn’t spent enough time with us to know. Maybe he’ll find out.