The 2026 question

If you haven’t listened to the It’s Called Football interview with Peter Montopoli do so now. He’s surprisingly candid throughout.

The interview was primarily focused on Canada’s bid for the 2015 Women’s World Cup. However, I did manage to slip in one question on the men’s side of the game. Actually, I directly asked whether Canada would consider bidding for the 2026 World Cup.

I expected pure spin and a denial – “we’re focusing on the Women’s bid and it’s too early to blah, blah, blah” – and there is a hint of that in the answer, but at no point was the idea dismissed. It was simply suggested that the Women’s bid had to be won first and that there would be infrastructure challenges to Canada hosting a World Cup.

Here is the full exchange:

[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]

Me: Are you planning on bidding for the 2026 World Cup (I tried to be coy and make a little joke, but ended up just bluntly putting it out there)

PM: Right now we’re concentrating on what we are trying to do for the next three months to get ready for this FIFA bid – it’s March 2 that we have to present to FIFA – so that’s really where our concentrations are. Obviously we’re aware of who has the bids in terms who has the men’s World Cup, who didn’t have the bids and which confederations received the bids and which didn’t. We’re fully aware of what that is. Anything on that angle for 2026 may be premature, but if it is – and I’ll just go back this isn’t about 2026, it’s about Canada being ready (to host the Women’s World Cup in 2015) – if it is that our country wishes to host a men’s World Cup we need to find 10 stadiums, 10 modern stadiums of 50,000 seats or greater. That’s the bottom line.

Me: So I didn’t hear you say no, but it’s a little too early to answer that question

PM: No, we need to really concentrate on our women’s World Cup bid, to secure the bid and to execute a fantastic event come 2015 – and it comes with the package of 2014 women's FIFA u20 World Cup – so really in saying that if we win the bid for the the FIFA Women’s World Cup then we will by that time when the event is executed we will have ran five FIFA events and certainly we have the background to run a major event, but the infrastructure in our country – well we would probably have airports that would be ready and that type of system – the stadium infrastructure would have to be in place and we would have to have a national professional soccer league for men.

Reading between the lines I see him saying “You’re damn right we could pull it off, but we need to get some stadiums built/expanded (there are four stadiums that would work now) and we really need to get moving on the league everyone tells us we can’t pull off.

Winning the Women’s World Cup would probably create three or four more stadiums in the 30,000 range. This country is wealthy enough to build the rest (you don’t need to build them until you win the bid). The CSA is sincere when it says that winning the WWC is the most important thing right now. It is. Both on its own merit and as a legacy event that can get more stadiums built.

There is too much detail in Montopoli’s answer to believe that I’m the only one that’s done the math on 2026. Make no mistake, if Canada wins the WWC, the possibility of a 2026 will start to be investigated.

It’s early days, but it’s never too soon to dream big.