Quote:
Originally Posted by EnvisionSaintJohn
Were Canadians seriously arguing that we should stop calling it soccer back then? Or that we need professional leagues with a system of promotion and relegation?
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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.
We can't adopt a P+R pyramid the same we can't adopt the Aussie "successful sport" model. Both the NRL and AFL were single-city based leagues that then slowly added other cities until you could call them "national" leagues. Can you imagine an NHL with 7 Montreal teams, or a MLB with 9 NYC teams?
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.
It works in other countries because soccer is
far and away the dominant sport. North America and Aus have about 4-5 sports where none is truly dominant the way soccer is in most European and LatAm countries.
Looking at the prototypical example, England. Yes, they do it in soccer, but even in their second most popular sport, rugby, they are struggling to sustain P+R in the professional era and a moving slowly towards a closed top league. Because they lack the culture of
enough people supporting professional rugby.
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.
In closing - all CFL
and soccer fans should just switch to rugby
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