I know.
I promised I would start things on a positive note, and there is much to be positive about. For the first time since the heady days of NASL, this weekend will see an all-Canadian top flight professional football derby: the Vancouver Whitecaps versus Toronto FC. Even a cursory glance at the little fragments on Canadian soccer history that exist on the web (*cough* AMSL *cough*) will tell you this is a momentous weekend in Canadian soccer history.
And so, a Canadian sports media industry appalled at the NHL’s head-in-the-sand attitude on player injuries; bored with yet another upcoming session of sound-and-fury Spring training for the Jays (signifying nothing as usual); and not quite sure how to get out of covering the Raptors forever; would surely look to MLS for a respite from the depressing day-to-day grind of the North American sports machine. Right?
Well, not really, no.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
The noise you’ve heard out of Vancouver all week wasn’t the Southsiders preparing to trash visiting Toronto, or BC’s footy faithful thanking the sky their Whitecaps are once again in a top flight professional league. Nope, it was the terrible screeching sound of a made-up media controversy over a
Perhaps it’s the wide-ranging cliché (thank you St. Pauli, Cesar Menotti, and Franklin Foer) that soccer is more politically progressive than its North American sister sports which led to the over-the-top reaction to the ad from some quarters, reaction that several major media outlets were more than willing to share with a world that may or may not care. The NFL may have filmed hours of scantily clad women to promote good old American gridiron, and the NHL’s beer sponsors think nothing of using buckets of sex to sling suds, but a two-minute YouTube ad with a painted model, well, that’s clearly more important than anything having to do with soccer.
I’m not here to debate whether or not the ad is sexist (it doesn’t have much to do with football and is clearly an attention grabber, so it kind of sucks for those reasons alone). I also don’t want to rant and rave about overactive feminazis or some such nonsense. The chief offendee—prominent Vancouverite and Carol Shields offspring Anne Giardini—is perfectly entitled to her outrage. The question is, why were the Globe and Mail, the National Post and the Vancouver Sun so eager to give her a microphone and headlines in their respective A sections all week ahead of the main event?
Well, because faux-outrage over a whole lot of nothing is much easier to write about under deadline than, say, any other story more interesting and relevant to this weekend than this one. Obviously editors love this sort of story because it “sparks debate,” even if said debate goes absolutely nowhere before it even begins (“Didja see the ad with the painted girl for that soccer team? Man that was hot/sexist”) And webmasters love this sort of fluff because, oddly enough, any mention of offensive ads featuring nude models tends to generate a lot of web traffic.
Meanwhile countless, albeit far less sexy stories, like for example fans of the Whitecaps planning to attend the home opener who were also there when Vancouver beat Tampa Bay to win the NASL Soccer Bowl in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1979 (there’s got to be at least one), went unreported and unrecorded this week (the Globe and Mail came in with the save as of publishing with a big sports section story today, to be fair). Which sounds like naive hogwash, I know.
But here’s the thing.
I remember speaking once to the preeminent North American soccer historian Colin Jose about the importance of newspapers. Jose understands like no other that if you’re planning on doing some serious research in Canadian soccer history, your best friend is the local library’s microfiche collection. The entire untold epic of Canadian soccer, her forgotten accomplishments and long-faded milestones, are all exclusively found in archived newspaper articles. It’s easy to say, “well, the Internet provides a much wider database of information, via blogs, independent news websites, and the rest. Newspapers are off the hook.” But this information is diffuse, subjective, unedited—in short, impermanent. The value newspapers once offered—maintaining an objective public record—is fast disappearing in the hype of insta-news and water-cooler trivia.
With a few exceptions, that loss is telling ahead of this weekend’s milestone match. While it may seem trivial, the lack of serious, old fashioned print journalism on the main event leaves an important gap for future soccer fans interested in discovering the game's history. You can almost see it—a future researcher looking to get a sense of the anticipation of this game and its place in Canadian soccer history finds instead a lot of dead blog links and nothing of substance in the newspaper archives save a few once-sentence paragraphs mentioning the daughter of a novelist screaming about a two minute YouTube video of a painted model. We owe Canadian soccer history something better.