CPL General

[Kingston]

2 minutes ago, Unnamed Trialist said:

The one factor perhaps missing is longer-term contracts. 

We just accept a lot of players are on year contracts with maybe an option because the whole damn thing is so tentative. Who imposed this, the league? Is it because salaries were so low it was hard to ask a players to commit for any longer?

But really, if you invest in a player, and if a player is going to sign, then the contract should be a bit longer, even at 2 with an option we'd be better off. I wonder if the players union will address this.

Then we are about to have our first season without Covid (?) since the initial campaign, so we are finally getting to a semblance of stability for fans, thus income. If you have a stable league, and you are working on building a team to get results (make playoffs, win a league, maybe get to a Voyageurs Cup final, whatever the goal), you have to be able to build on the previous season. So longer-term contracts.

I think we'll see more two and three year-plus-an-option-year type contacts going forward.

For one, as you say, the owners now have a sense of what their revenues are, so they know what they can offer and not end up way past what they can support.  There was no real way to know that in the inaugural season or the heavily covid years.

For two, everyone also now has a sense of the level of play in the league.  So coaches know whether a guy is going to be a sellable prospect, a long term starter, or a "maybe try him for one year off the bench" kind of player.

[P-O]

Back in the 70's, nobody knew anything about soccer in Canada.

The cultural mosaik changed, and will always include more diversity.

I don't share your pessimism, and respect your opinion even if I don't agree with it.

[Unnamed Trialist]

3 minutes ago, P-O said:

Back in the 70's, nobody knew anything about soccer in Canada.

The cultural mosaik changed, and will always include more diversity.

I don't share your pessimism, and respect your opinion even if I don't agree with it.

[P-O]

12 minutes ago, Unnamed Trialist said:

Nope, but we need to thank our ancients for keeping the fire, and the game alive! 🙃 

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

59 minutes ago, P-O said:

Back in the 70's, nobody knew anything about soccer in Canada....

Would have been news to one of my first cousins who was playing in the NSL at the time in front of 5000+ on occasion in the GTA against players coming in from places like Italy on up to $100k for the summer from what I've been told by people who would know. Compare and contrast with what happens with York United now.

By the late 70s, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal had NASL teams that could draw crowds comparable to what MLS teams draw now. Insigne from Napoli in the early 2020s and Bettega from Juventus in the early 1980s. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Edited January 26, 2023 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[Ansem]

33 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

Would have been news to one of my first cousins who was playing in the NSL at the time in front of 5000+ on occasion in the GTA against players coming in from places like Italy on up to $100k for the summer from what I've been told by people who would know. Compare and contrast with what happens with York United now.

By the late 70s, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal had NASL teams that could draw crowds comparable to what MLS teams draw now. Insigne from Napoli in the early 2020s and Bettega from Juventus in the early 1980s. The more things change the more they stay the same.

[m-g-williams]

Not exactly earth-shattering news, but it is kind of nice to see the league celebrating its own accomplishments.

https://canpl.ca/article/cpl-kicks-off-five-year-celebration-with-anniversary-logo

[SoccMan]

3 hours ago, SpursFlu said:

Mo money + mo sun = mo happiness 

Income tax in Arizona look to be less than 1/3 of what it is in Ontario. Cost of living, forget about it

Oh really that’s great and most of their taxes probably going to fund you know the big US military weapons manufacturing industry. Paying very low income tax is great , hopefully no medical emergency happens where you have to mortgage your house for a simple medical procedure.

[SoccMan]

1 hour ago, P-O said:

Nope, but we need to thank our ancients for keeping the fire, and the game alive! 🙃 

I would suspect the majority of posters on these forums that were born from the 1990’s and on would probably not be huge soccer fans if they were born in the 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s before the internet , smart phones and everything else that we have today . Finding a game to watch on tv  or even an article in any newspaper to read about was almost non existent. Moreover, if you ever read about anything soccer related in a newspaper or any soccer talk on tv it was mainly someone criticizing the sport . Looking back as someone who was born and raised in Canada in the 1960’s it’s incredible that I somehow grew up loving this sport because hardly anyone I knew was into soccer never mind the Canadian national team .

[Aird25]

..

Edited January 26, 2023 by Aird25
Unhelpful

[Bison44]

Ehhhh???  Whadda say??  Boomer??  Are the germans coming for round 3??  

[Unnamed Trialist]

3 hours ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

Would have been news to one of my first cousins who was playing in the NSL at the time in front of 5000+ on occasion in the GTA against players coming in from places like Italy on up to $100k for the summer from what I've been told by people who would know. Compare and contrast with what happens with York United now.

By the late 70s, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal had NASL teams that could draw crowds comparable to what MLS teams draw now. Insigne from Napoli in the early 2020s and Bettega from Juventus in the early 1980s. The more things change the more they stay the same.

We really lived the game in Vancouver in the 70s, we went away in hundreds to Seattle and Empire was on fire and fun, there were lively supporter sections.

We played, September to May. A friend's father started one of the first girls leagues and I coached first season when I was still a teenager. We watched Soccer Made in Germany on PBS. We had nowhere near the access or understanding but it was a weekly thing. Only thing missing, really, was they didn't have high school soccer and we didn't play much pick-up. 

But there were places, like now, colonized by American sports culture.

 

[nolando]

47 minutes ago, Unnamed Trialist said:

We really lived the game in Vancouver in the 70s, we went away in hundreds to Seattle and Empire was on fire and fun, there were lively supporter sections.

We played, September to May. A friend's father started one of the first girls leagues and I coached first season when I was still a teenager. We watched Soccer Made in Germany on PBS. We had nowhere near the access or understanding but it was a weekly thing. Only thing missing, really, was they didn't have high school soccer and we didn't play much pick-up. 

But there were places, like now, colonized by American sports culture.

 

I was at Empire just last night, lamenting what was and what might have still been.

[Watchmen]

7 hours ago, Kingston said:

I pretty much agree with this although I think the era of the CPL being a league for second chances is diminishing.  When the CPL started, there were quite a few guys floating around who had been recently cut by MLS squads.  A bunch of them got a second chance with the CPL. 

That initial pool of three years of MLS cuts has now been depleted, however.  I imagine we will still see the odd MLS castoff getting a second chance but as the D3 and CPL levels continue to rise I think we'll see less of it.  If they do come over it will be with the idea of playing in the CPL "permanently" (see Kyle Bekker) rather than as a second chance to go back up.

I'll confess that I don't regularly track all the incoming players to CPL. Further  MLS Next Pro is going to be the "second chance"/further development for a number of the MLS academy players. Still, I suspect we'll see a number of players eventually leave these systems and end up in CPL.  I think we're also reaching an uneasy truce, where MLS and CPL are willing to work out loan agreements with neither side feeling threatened. 

[Watchmen]

7 hours ago, Unnamed Trialist said:

The one factor perhaps missing is longer-term contracts. 

We just accept a lot of players are on year contracts with maybe an option because the whole damn thing is so tentative. Who imposed this, the league? Is it because salaries were so low it was hard to ask a players to commit for any longer?

But really, if you invest in a player, and if a player is going to sign, then the contract should be a bit longer, even at 2 with an option we'd be better off. I wonder if the players union will address this.

Then we are about to have our first season without Covid (?) since the initial campaign, so we are finally getting to a semblance of stability for fans, thus income. If you have a stable league, and you are working on building a team to get results (make playoffs, win a league, maybe get to a Voyageurs Cup final, whatever the goal), you have to be able to build on the previous season. So longer-term contracts.

The one benefit to players of short term contracts is that if there is interest from Europe or MLS they can essentially leave on a free, and that can make them more valuable. But it is a gamble.

[MM3/MM2/MM]

4 hours ago, SoccMan said:

I would suspect the majority of posters on these forums that were born from the 1990’s and on would probably not be huge soccer fans if they were born in the 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s before the internet , smart phones and everything else that we have today . Finding a game to watch on tv  or even an article in any newspaper to read about was almost non existent. Moreover, if you ever read about anything soccer related in a newspaper or any soccer talk on tv it was mainly someone criticizing the sport . Looking back as someone who was born and raised in Canada in the 1960’s it’s incredible that I somehow grew up loving this sport because hardly anyone I knew was into soccer never mind the Canadian national team .

I was born in Gaspé, so had zero exposure to soccer until I moved to Montreal in the early sixties, got lucky that our school principal was from England and would throw a soccer ball into the school yard at lunch, we had a fairly large immigrant community in NDG, so got to kick the ball around with Italians and Jamaicans.   Attended games in the original NASL with the Olympique de Montréal and got my soccer fix buying L'Equipe and France Football.  At 26 I was one of the co-founders of the NDG Soccer Association and a year later the President.  Totally immersed in soccer when it was mostly an after thought in Quebec, still active in the game to this day.

Edited January 27, 2023 by MM3/MM2/MM

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

 

 

[BearcatSA]

6 hours ago, Unnamed Trialist said:

We really lived the game in Vancouver in the 70s, we went away in hundreds to Seattle and Empire was on fire and fun, there were lively supporter sections.

We played, September to May. A friend's father started one of the first girls leagues and I coached first season when I was still a teenager. We watched Soccer Made in Germany on PBS. We had nowhere near the access or understanding but it was a weekly thing. Only thing missing, really, was they didn't have high school soccer and we didn't play much pick-up. 

But there were places, like now, colonized by American sports culture.

 

Soccer Made in Germany with Toby Charles on tv, gawd ya!  Don't forget Bernie Pascall hosting that midweek Whitecaps show on BCTV, including that corny (perhaps because it was the soccer version of cornhole) segment where a local celebrity guest would try to kick shots into target holes on plywood (I remember Gene Kiniski toejamming the leather off the ball  to no avail).  

[SthMelbRed]

Rollins is such a pathetic loser. 🙄

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

13 hours ago, SoccMan said:

....Looking back as someone who was born and raised in Canada in the 1960’s it’s incredible that I somehow grew up loving this sport because hardly anyone I knew was into soccer never mind the Canadian national team .

I think you are from an Italian background right? Would you not have had Toronto Italia to support in the ECPSL and NSL and youth soccer to get involved with through the Italian community? The stories I heard about what happened with my cousins arriving in London, Ont in the late 60s was that after a day or so a Scottish kid from the same subdivision comes by and asks "dae ye play fitba?" and within a couple of days they had been signed up to play for a youth club. Stephen Harper's "old stock" population had no interest back in the 60s (with a few exceptions like certain parts of Nfld and BC) but a sizable chunk of the population in areas like the larger cities in southern Ontario that received the post-WWII immigration wave was still doing its own thing with soccer under the radar in mainstream media terms.

Anyway, where was I even going with this nostalgia trip? One of the mistakes I think that Canadian pro soccer usually makes is that it always tends to act like it is starting with a blank page and needs to actively recruit people from a Tim Hortons or Canadian Tire commercial to the sport who are not already fans by droning on about diving supposedly being an issue but we've fixed that etc when what they really need to do first and foremost is get the core of the soccer community that's already out there firmly on board with what they are doing. The problem with obsessively targeting non-fans is that what gets said while doing that can actually turn off the sport's core base who were a lot more likely to show up as regular customers if catered to sensibly.

The other mistake is always overreaching with an economic model that tries to emulate the CFL leading to boom and bust cycles and not being happy with something a bit lower key that putters along sustainably at a certain level like the NSL did for several decades that isn't what you really ideally wanted but still has the potential for organic growth. Right now things are still in boom mode but with FCE already gone if the Blue Bombers as has already been hinted at decide that Valour crowds aren't cutting the mustard, CanPL could easily stagger into an existential crisis that could have been avoided if the approach at the outset had been somewhat different.

Edited January 27, 2023 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[P-O]

13 hours ago, SoccMan said:

I would suspect the majority of posters on these forums that were born from the 1990’s and on would probably not be huge soccer fans if they were born in the 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s before the internet , smart phones and everything else that we have today . Finding a game to watch on tv  or even an article in any newspaper to read about was almost non existent. Moreover, if you ever read about anything soccer related in a newspaper or any soccer talk on tv it was mainly someone criticizing the sport . Looking back as someone who was born and raised in Canada in the 1960’s it’s incredible that I somehow grew up loving this sport because hardly anyone I knew was into soccer never mind the Canadian national team .

I was born in 85. Soccer fan since 1999. The Treble. Mancunian coming here.

Loved soccer because of a student exchange. Coming from a rural area didn't help at all.

[Treppy2]

9 hours ago, BearcatSA said:

Soccer Made in Germany with Toby Charles on tv, gawd ya!  Don't forget Bernie Pascall hosting that midweek Whitecaps show on BCTV, including that corny (perhaps because it was the soccer version of cornhole) segment where a local celebrity guest would try to kick shots into target holes on plywood (I remember Gene Kiniski toejamming the leather off the ball  to no avail).  

That was 90 minutes of soccer compressed into a one-hour time slot, right? I never really noticed where they made the cuts to the broadcast to trim 30 minutes. I have fond memories of watching the show on Saturday afternoons while eating leftover dim sum that my mom brought home from her weekly lunch outing.

[narduch]

If a CPL team ever makes a miracle run in the CCL, they could qualify for a new tournament with teams from Conmebol.

[BearcatSA]

1 hour ago, Treppy2 said:

That was 90 minutes of soccer compressed into a one-hour time slot, right? I never really noticed where they made the cuts to the broadcast to trim 30 minutes. I have fond memories of watching the show on Saturday afternoons while eating leftover dim sum that my mom brought home from her weekly lunch outing.

I was going to school in Vancouver in the mid 80s and that's where I saw it on cable.  And, it was on PBS, because it filled a niche there.  Lots of bad mullet perms, notably on the keepers!  

[narduch]

Opening weekend matches