A final vote by FIFA member associations on June 13 guarantees Canada’s participation in the 2026 World Cup of Soccer.
While playing in the 48-team tournament is not a sure thing, yet, co-hosting with Mexico and the United States could draw interest from a generation of young viewers who may be inspired to take up the sport and bring it to new heights for their respective nations.
Soccer is already the most popular sport in Mexico, so the effect might not be as dramatic in that country, but the men’s program in Canada could use a boost. While our women’s national team is ranked fourth in the world, the men are all the way down in 79th and did not come close to qualifying for this year’s World Cup, which began yesterday in Russia.
When the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, its current top professional league, Major League Soccer (MLS), had yet to begin play. It started in 1996 and now boasts 23 teams, including three in Canada.
Sports has a way of building momentum. Many basketball commenters credit Vince Carter’s tenure with the Toronto Raptors and the emergence of Steve Nash as a perennial NBA all-star for the explosion of talent in that sport across Canada. Our country now supplies the NBA with more players than any other country not called the United States.
This happened because of the presence of athletes excelling at the highest level of their sport in front of young eyes watching on television, or for those lucky enough, live.
Hosting 10 games (Mexico also gets 10; US will host 60) over the course of the most-watched sporting event in the world will put billions of eyes on games in Edmonton, Montreal and Toronto, many of them children watching at home in Canada. One could be the next Christine Sinclair or Lionel Messi, rather than the next Hayley Wickenheiser or Sidney Crosby.
Current Vancouver Whitecaps player Alphonso Davies is 17. Based on his performance of late, by 2026, the current MLS player of the week might be poised to do for soccer in Canada what Carter and Nash accomplished for popularity of basketball here.
As for this year’s tournament, Canadian soccer fans will have to choose a country to root for and keep dreaming for glory in 2026.
