Quote:
Originally Posted by jonny24
Yes. It's basically never ending. The way you type this (large volume) of opinion, I'd swear you were one of them.
Elly nailed it in mentioning the same same sort of "it's the world game, we must do everything like elsewhere" is usually combined with a need to put down Canadian football or gridiron football in general, and really peaked around the time the Argos moved to BMO.
IMO: We don't need to copy what anyone else does, we need to do what works here. And looking at every other successful league, CFL/NHL/NFL/MLB, that means fixed franchises. I include the American leagues because, more than almost any other cultural or social institution, North America (well, Canada/USA) really is one sporting market.
I get the desire - it really is, for lack of a better word, romantic for every town to have their team and they all find their level and move up and down. But we don't have the history, culture, or population density for it to work.
The best thing for Canadian soccer is to actually have a professional league, and the only way that's managed to happen is the same way every other professional league on this continent has managed to happen - franchises. IF the CPL ever got to say, 20 teams, once could imagine splitting into 2 leagues of 10, but that would be entirely dependent on there being so much money that relegation didn't hurt the owners. I'm not saying that could never happen, but it's so far from the reality of today that it's hard to say it ever will.
I get that internet forums are the place for expounding on very passionate, niche views, but yours in particular is one of the biggest turnoffs to non-soccer fans from ever becoming so. I don't mind watching individual games of soccer (when they're actually playing and not conning/arguing with the ref), but a significant subset of fans are so precious about the whole thing that it's quite offputting.
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Fantastic post, wish I could have communicated that as well as you did.
I can't stand when people can't be bothered to edit a post down to its relevant points but everything you said was such a great point so I'm only going to remove a few sentences.
You picked the perfect word to describe the zeal for his points. A long time ago I remember a politician speaking about how easy it is to get younger people hooked on things like separatism because it's a romantic notion to try and start your own country. Romantic yes, easy, no. Danielle Smith commented on that not long ago when she tempered the wannabe separatists with the reality of how difficult (if not impossible) it would be to accomplish.
I suspect the poster sees this as a romantic venture to "right" Canada's ship from its wavering course but not realizing how the folks he romanticizes were the primary causes of the rough waters.
The soccer zealots have a particular zeal to convert others to the only game that seems to exist in their mind by trying to demean and degrade other sports which is particularly naive in Canada when we are so invested in so many other sports and winter sports to boot. Those are issues that aren't faced in South America and Africa where soccer can easily take the forefront.