Perhaps it’s because I’m a child of the Internet, but the holder of the World Cup rights in this country has never meant that much to me. I tend to skip pre-game shows and use half time for a bathroom break/beer run, and the game commentary tends to be the pre-fab international feed with its assortment of b-list commentators anyway (I often cheated and watched ESPN’s 2010 World Cup coverage online when I had the opportunity, particularly for the US Algeria game with delerious results). Unlike European football television rights in this country which force viewers to meander through an interminable maze of endless channel packages, World Cups tend to be “on the TV” one way or another.
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Bell Media has won the rights this time around, beating out traditional World Cup hosts the CBC (if you want a reason to smash your face on your desk, read Bruce Dowbiggin’s typically idiotic take). That means a lot of cross-channel, cross-platform promotion. Fine, whatever. But the decision however does bother me, but not for any political allegiance to the Mothercorp. Rather, it’s the blow to CBC’s involvement in Canadian online soccer journalism.
The last bastion of national, mainstream Canadian online soccer coverage comes from television networks providing content as a draw for their sports properties. If I’m honest, the CBC was the best of a bad bunch, with several standout voices like Pedro Mendes and Jason de Vos. Despite persistent rumours to the contrary I respect what John Molinaro does, but it was telling that Rogers Sportsnet poached him as part of their rebranding. Molinaro tends to do “straight” sports writing—match reports, player interviews—while de Vos does the kind of Canadian state of the union commentary on the unsexy and non-sports blathery governance and player development issues you can’t find in any other nationwide platform.
Mendes on the other hand started something interesting and unique with his Soccernation podcast, the kind of show few other broadcasters would attempt. Smart, provocative, yet still eager to reach a non-hardcore audience interested in the game in this country, his short minidocs were something special. As the CBC drops soccer coverage and moves on to other projects, and so will Pedro.
My point is Bell and Rogers, who between them have basically conquered the TV soccer market, have so far maintained the status quo when it comes to Canadian footy news, which is to hang the load on one or two interesting voices (Butler, Wileman at TSN for example) and fill the rest of the space with AP reports. CBC wasn’t much different, but there was a concerted effort to report on Canadian soccer as a whole beyond TFC and MLS. As of writing, for example, neither TSN nor Rogers front pages feature any news at all on the Canadian women winning the gold medal match against Brazil in the Pan Am games.
With no incentive to invest in covering the game in Canada left, there are now doubts over whether the CBC will continue to provide original, Canada-focused online news content (national newspapers here long gave up covering this beat). I know, I know; from a broadcaster’s perspective, who gives a shit? From a hardcore fan’s perspective, there are plenty of other better options, like CSN. But the principle that Canadian mainstream sports media should cover all aspects of the Canadian sport— including soccer, which, contrary to Dowbiggin is not just the sport of Yuppies and the “multi-ethnic” crowd (whatever the fuck that means)—has now pretty much flatlined, while the MSM practice of carving up anything that's not hockey in this country into niche sport news ghettos continues unabated.