Colonel Green

The deeply unpopular right-wing president got really frustrated with the opposition-controlled parliament and tried to declare martial law as an end-run around all his political opponents, then backed down almost immediately when parliament and the public at large told him to fuck off.

Also, the CHL isn’t a model for a pro league because it is not a pro league. It only works because its players basically don’t get paid. Not that anybody is rolling in dough playing in the CPL, but they definitely make more than CHL players do.

Pretty much, yeah. What the CPL is right now is basically the bare minimum for an actual domestic pro league. And really, they are not chasing the idea of eclipsing MLS. Most of the markets they have chosen could never support an MLS team. This is an idea that exists only in your head.

Having a domestic pro league requires spending money to build something worth having, yes.

It chugged along for 70 years while making barely a ripple in the Canadian sport scene.

I'm not sure who you think you're arguing against? If somebody wants to buy a franchise with an appropriate stadium in the GTA, nobody is saying they shouldn't be able to. But there is a conspicuous lack of people queuing up to do that.

Baseball in particular is in a different spot than the others, but I don't think there are any teams in, say, the NHL that categorically couldn't win under the current draft/hard salary cap model. Winnipeg is commonly cited along with Columbus as one of the locations playing GM in hard mode, and right now they are off to the best start of any team in NHL history. Clubs like you're describing are generally storied community institutions with 100+ years of history and associated diehard fans who don't care if the club never wins anything because their great-granddaddy was a supporter of the club from birth. You can't create stuff like that out of nothing. Also, they're often supported by leagues (or league systems) having lucrative media deals that the CPL conspicuously lacks. The CPL (and the North American pro game in general) for me is at its worst when it's most obviously trying to be a slavish copy of how things are in Europe (looking at you, Real Salt Lake) and acting like it has a long history that it actually doesn't.

That is not a winning pitch to establish multiple teams in one city (let alone a city that already has a citywide team in the same sport and a bunch of teams in other, traditionally more popular sports).

Yes, to me this is the big issue. When you look at a lot of these European cities that have multiple clubs, usually they started out as neighbourhood/borough organizations in places with very pronounced cultural identities for different parts of the city. That kinda doesn't exist in Toronto, at least not to the same degree. People who live in Toronto are used to supporting citywide teams, which would include the MLS team that notionally is from the whole region. Trying to then carve off parts of that and say that actually we're the team from this section of town is going to be a challenge.

There doesn’t appear to be any actual inside information, etc., it’s just one commentator’s hot take.

Clubs ranked by name: Tides Rapid Wild (would rank higher but it's less unique, e.g., Minnesota Wild) Roses Rise Toronto AFC Clubs ranked by logo: Wild Rapid Roses Tides Rise Toronto AFC As there's no link between NSL and CPL, I don't see any reason why having a Montreal NSL team would lead to the latter also having one. Montreal already does have a men's team in MLS.

https://www.cbc.ca/sports/soccer/nsl-womens-soccer-montreal-unveils-name-1.7346689 Roses FC ("Montreal Roses" and "Les Roses de Montreal") is confirmed.

The U20 team in 2022 was demoralizingly bad, so as frustrating as this tournament could be, it was undeniably a huge improvement.

Oh for fuck's sake.

Holy shit!