Canadian football ready for World Cup coming out party
Bayern Munich star Alphonso Davies (right) heads a new generation of players who have lifted Canada up the global rankings (Vaughn Ridley) Exactly 150 years after Carlton Cricket Club and Toronto Lacrosse Club took part in the first recorded organised football match in Canada in 1876, Canadian soccer is finally ready for its coming out party. When Canada faces Bosnia-Herzegovina on June 12 in the team's first ever World Cup match on home soil, it will be the latest stop on a decades-long journey of development that has seen football gain a solid foothold in a sporting landscape dominated by ice hockey. Already the largest participatory sport in Canada with nearly one million registered players, the 2026 World Cup is set to deliver another jolt of momentum to the country's rapidly emerging football scene.
Canada will host 13 matches -- six in Toronto, seven in Vancouver -- with Canada also facing Qatar and Switzerland in Group B. In two previous appearances at the World Cup -- the 1986 finals in Mexico and the 2022 tournament in Qatar -- Canada has compiled a perfect record of futility: played six and lost six. Yet Canada's American coach Jesse Marsch insists that the tournament co-hosts aren't just making up the numbers at their own party.
"We want to win the World Cup," Marsch said in an interview last year. "That may sound ridiculous, but why would we go into any tournament at any time and think, 'Yeah, let's see how we do, and maybe we get one win. Or can we score a goal?
'" Marsch said that kind of thinking was Canadian football's "dialog in the past. " - 'Love of the team' - But with a group of players which is often described as the best Canadian squad ever assembled, featuring the likes of Bayern Munich star Alphonso Davies and Juventus's Jonathan David, Marsch is adamant that there are grounds for optimism. "This team now, the standard of what we think we can be is growing," Marsch said.
"We know that it'll be hard. I don't think our group is easy. It's possible we get knocked out of the group, like all these things are possible.