If a federation’s competence was solely determined by the performance of its senior national teams, few would question the trajectory of Canada Soccer.
The women’s national team, ranked eighth in the world, is trying to defend its Olympic gold medal and has registered three wins from three group games in Paris. In 2022, the men’s team qualified for their first World Cup since 1986, then followed that up with an inspired run to the Copa America semifinals this summer.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about Canada Soccer as an organization.
Canada’s impressive group-stage performances at the Olympics have come despite a spy saga that led to a six-point deduction. The Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the penalty on Wednesday after Canada was found to have used a drone to spy on a New Zealand training session before their first group match.
Initially, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) contended that a six-point penalty was too harsh when the team had supposedly only used a drone to observe one opponent’s training. Surely, being docked the equivalent of two wins at the Olympics was a reach too far — or so they tried to argue.
But then FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, published excerpts from an email from Canada women’s coach Bev Priestman — who was given a year-long suspension a week ago, along with an assistant coach and an unaccredited team analyst. She claimed that, to her, such acts “can be the difference between winning and losing”.
Bev Priestman, the coach at the centre of Canada’s spying scandal (Brad Smith/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images)
An attorney for Priestman did not return a message from The Athletic on Wednesday seeking comment.
Although the CAS investigation was focused solely on these Olympic Games, it did unearth evidence that such acts of aerial espionage have been part of the program’s approach to men’s and women’s soccer for years. Using drones to spy was “a practice started by one person (redacted) and continued by Bev Priestman. It was not facilitated by the federation”. The redacted individual is said to have been part of both the women’s and men’s programs.
Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue has also admitted Canada, including the men’s national team at the recent Copa America, used drones to attempt to spy on opponents at previous major events. “The more I learn about this specific matter, the more concerned I get about a potential long-term, deeply embedded systemic culture of this type of thing occurring, which is obviously completely unacceptable,” Blue said last week. An independent, external investigation is underway.
It would be one thing if what has happened in France was a misstep amid an otherwise nondescript federation operation. The reality, however, could be far more bleak from Canada Soccer’s perspective.
Canada line up for their Copa America semifinal against Argentina last month (Eduardo Munoz via Getty Images)
Canada will co-host the 2026 men’s World Cup but, if this “long-term, deeply embedded systemic culture” is proven, it calls into question the deservedness of such an opportunity.
The last time the nation hosted such a prestigious tournament was in 2015, when they held the Women’s World Cup. South of the border, the competition is best remembered for the United States women’s national team winning its third World Cup, beating Japan in the final.
At the time, however, winners and losers were rarely the day’s talking point. Instead, the narrative was why Canada would play such important matches on artificial turf, with none of the six venues using grass fields. It was the first time a World Cup had been held entirely on artificial surfaces.
The feedback from players was scathing. Australia forward Michelle Heyman compared the experience of playing a midsummer tournament on turf to “walking on hot coals” and that a player’s feet “just turn white, your skin is all ripped off”. USWNT striker Abby Wambach said it was “kind of a nightmare”, adding that it “affects everything” about how a ball rolls and bounces.
Wambach celebrates the USWNT’s World Cup win in Vancouver (Kevin C Cox/Getty Images)
Wambach was one of several players to file a lawsuit in Canada to demand that FIFA and Canada Soccer install natural grass in time for the tournament. They dropped the motion in January 2015, saying they had filed it too late and that FIFA wouldn’t budge. Canada was the only nation that had applied to host the 2015 Women’s World Cup.
In 2017, the nation was awarded co-hosting rights of the 2026 men’s edition of the World Cup with Mexico and the United States. A year after that decision, Canada Soccer finalized a media and sponsorship agreement with Canadian Soccer Business, a company owned and controlled by Canadian Premier League team owners.
The deal (which runs through 2027) sees CSB pay Canada Soccer an annual fee between $3million and $4million Canadian dollars (U.S. $2.2m and $2.9m). In exchange, the company receives all revenue from both national teams’ media rights and sponsorships. CSB also has the right to extend for a further decade, making it in line to be the primary financial beneficiary of the sport’s growth in Canada until 2037.
To say it set the federation at a financial disadvantage would be an understatement. Rather than setting it up with the spoils of co-hosting a World Cup, Canada Soccer settled for a dependable pittance.
By June 2023, the situation already seemed dire. Jason deVos, the federation’s interim general secretary at the time, told TSN that Canada Soccer may need to explore filing for bankruptcy protection.
“We are in a real struggle. It’s not imminent, but we need to explore what bankruptcy entails and how it might affect our organization,” DeVos said. “We don’t have enough revenue coming in for the programs that need to be run, and that includes everything from grassroots coach education and referee development to youth national teams and our senior men’s and women’s teams.”
Members of the nation’s parliament questioned why Canada Soccer would sell off such valuable media and sponsorship rights for two full decades. Canada Soccer president Nick Bontis and general secretary Earl Cochrane stepped down, with a proposed collective bargaining agreement between the men’s team and Canada Soccer still unsigned.
Parliament’s Heritage Committee held hearings in 2023 about safety in Canadian sports. The ensuing reforms, which focused on “representation” and financial transparency, were widely panned as inadequate.
And then came the drones, with Canada Soccer saying it “continued to believe that our players should not have been unnecessarily punished for actions that were not their own” after CAS upheld the six-point deduction on Wednesday.
The federation was wise to swiftly try returning focus to its talented players. After all, this — the latest in a series of missteps and unforced errors in the boardroom — still leaves the federation, as a whole, looking deeply unserious. Between financial mismanagement and potentially enabling a culture of cheating, it’s all they can point to as evidence of operational functionality.
With a 1-0 win over Colombia on Wednesday, Canada advanced to the Olympic quarterfinal despite their leadership on the touchline and in the boardroom. They’re still in contention to defend their Olympic women’s soccer title after a trio of triumphs. Considering they’re on even footing with every other team in the knockout stage, some may argue a six-point deduction was too lenient.
Whatever transpires, this is the state of discussing Canada Soccer: a federation that oversees two talented national teams but continues to embarrass itself when the ball stops rolling.
(Top photo: Tullio M Puglia/Getty Images))
