World Cup 2026

[Nite]

Originally Posted by EnvisionSaintJohn

All good, thought provoking points.


I’d say the big difference between the NHL and MLS though, is that the NHL is, by far, the best professional hockey league on earth, while the MLS is debatably not even in the global top ten of professional soccer/football leagues.


It would be tremendously difficult and probably extremely unpopular for a CANEXIT to occur in the NHL… but the MLS? Not so much.

The MLS isn’t even close to the most popular soccer league among Canadian soccer fans, as the top flights of Europe are far more popular when it comes to viewership among Canadians… even if much of that viewership is on non official streams online.

Sure, there might be some MLS super fans in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal that don’t want to see their clubs leave the MLS and join the CPL, but most soccer fans in Canada won’t care about the three Canadian clubs leaving the MLS, since they don’t follow the MLS to begin with.

I get that the MLS has done a lot to develop Canadian soccer talent, but it really hasn’t done much to create “soccer culture” across Canada, since there’s only teams in our three biggest cities … and Canada is quite a big, spread out country to say the least.

Professional soccer in Canada should be modeled after the English Football League system (complete with relegation/promotion)… and not modeled after American pro sports traditions like is the case with the MLS… at least not if the goal is to actually grow soccer culture, or even win the World Cup one day!

So if the Canadian teams leave MLS where is the 4 to 8 million dollar that is currently being spent by these teams their academies and scouting network going to come from, because the revenue in the CPL can't afford to have any team run an academy, which is a requirement for all MLS teams.

It's the scouting being done by the 3 MLS teams for their academies that is responsible for all the improvement in the Canadian national team. Just loosing 1 of the 3 teams would cripple the development of Canadian soccer players.