Canadian women's international Kaylyn Kyle wrote that on her Twitter feed early Saturday morning (and appeared to take it down not long after...). It's telling that a Canadian player would be thinking about ways to get more support for her team. It's sad that she's concerned about it one day before the team is to play Brazil in the championship game of the Torneio Internacional Cidade de São Paulo.If anyone knows of any Business that would like to sponsor our CWNT in anyway please tweet me or msg me!
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The lack of corporate support for Canadian soccer continues to be a problem. As I wrote during the World Cup it's a bit irritating to see much of corporate Canada tripping over itself to be associated with the tournament while ignoring the sport domestically.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1COKBnMd7A
The Rogers ad at the back end of the video is a good example of the phenomenon. The office went crazy when Spain scored. I can't find a clip of it, but a CIBC ad in which average Canadians that work for the bank told the camera what country they support was the worst offender. None of the employees, of course, said Canada and, of course, CIBC was nowhere to be found during Canada’s World Cup qualifying campaign.
On the women's side of things it's even worse. Women's sport never gets the type of attention that the men's game does. Although we shouldn't be too critical of any company that does chose to attach itself to the team the Winners deal that is in place is clearly not enough. If it was then Kyle wouldn't be on Twitter on a Saturday morning looking for support.
During the World Cup I asked people to write me at dgrollins@gmail.com about why you think corporate Canada should do more to support the game in the country. About 50 people did. By all means keep sending me letters and once I have enough (let's say 100) I will forward them on to a few appropriate companies.
Clearly 100 e-mails from a crazy blogger isn't going to do much on its own. As supporters of Canadian national teams you need to convince corporate Canada that it's worth their time to hitch themselves to the home team rather than living vicariously through the rest of the world.
And then maybe we wouldn't have midfielders looking for money on Twitter.