As promised, Benjamin Massey has continued to take a closer look at how to make a national Canadian soccer league work.
Canadian Soccer League Would Have To Think Outside The Box
He’s already laid out why one is necessary and which cities he thinks are viable. Now he takes a look at the mechanics of such a league.
With one failed national league already in the morgue, lessons learned from the original days of the NASL and the knowledge that a Canadian league will have to be different than MLS, Massey sees a need to think a little outside the box.
Chief among the requirements is aggressive revenue sharing.
A Canadian second division can’t afford to be that unstable. The division’s credibility depends on being able to build popularity in all of its markets and promise professional soccer for years to come.
He also sees a need for slow growth, a hard salary cap, a split fall/spring schedule and a ban on allowing successful teams to bolt for MLS.
On the last point, he assumes the Vancouver Whitecaps, Toronto FC and Montreal Impact will remain in MLS, but thinks its imperative that other teams are forced to stay in the Canadian league.
A Canadian league has to avoid the fate of the American second division, which has allowed its best teams to be picked off one by one by Major League Soccer. Once Montreal is gone, the only reliably, historically profitable team in the NASL will be the Puerto Rico Islanders. Does that sound like a path to long-term league happiness? That cannot happen in Canada; we haven’t got the market depth to keep replacing defecting teams with new ones.
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