BEHIND THE PLAY #55

Ticket packages are starting to roll out. Qualifying in most confederations is well under way. It’s time to start looking at what Canada has to do to be successful in 2026.

I plopped down a deposit on hospitality packages last month. $500 that you can apply to Hospitality tickets or other regular tickets once they go on sale. I’ve now seen the prices of those hospitality packages. $9000 to follow Canada in their three round robin games (no, it doesn’t include airfare to Toronto). If you want hospitality for BC Place games then, for now anyways, you need to get it for all seven games. At $2000 per seat per game so that’s $14,000. This is waaaay more than Hospitality tickets cost at the 2022 World Cup. Looks like I’ll need to hope my luck in the FIFA ticket lotteries continues because those prices are well out of my comfort zone!

In the meantime, Canada Soccer announced two friendlies for the September window. One against Romania and the other against Wales. Reaction was a bit on the spoiled brat-ish side of things. We got used to playing France, Holland, Argentina (twice) and Uruguay last year and this came across as a bit of a downgrade. Sort of like (I imagine) when a well-placed friend manages to get you an upgrade to Business or First Class on a flight and then you feel hard done by when you have to go back and fly Economy after that.

But it makes sense.

We’ll be a top seed at the World Cup. That means the three host nations won’t be up against the best nine countries in the world who will be the top seeds in the other nine (of twelve) groups of four. Instead, we will be grouped with second, third and fourth seeded teams. Which is where Romania and Wales would fit should they qualify. And if we want to advance out of our group, which, make no mistake, should clearly be the goal for Canada, we need to be comfortable with teams of that quality.

And once the grass goes in at BC Place you can expect our dance card to be full as countries who expect to qualify or already have will very much want games in North America to get used to the cities and the stadiums. Sure, we may opt for a money spinner if Brazil want to play at BC Place but on June 12 we play the 2nd seed in our group at BMO Field then the third and fourth seed at BC Place on June 18 and 24 respectively so teams ranked 10th to 34th approximately are who we should be looking to play and we will likely have our pick of them.

So I’m going to spend time between now and June 2026 touching on various topics related to the World Cup but none more so than how Canada is, and should be, preparing for it.

For starters today I want to look at our player pool and see how each of the players is currently trending. It’s early and given half the squad is playing in MLS which just started their season this past weekend it’s not worth putting too much stock in where players are at now but it will be interested to track their (highly subjective) progress.

Here’s how it looks at the moment.

Click here for to see the spreadsheet I’m working off of that has additional info that didn’t fit well here. That info includes brief notes on each player along with their club, number of caps and goals for Canada.

Here’s what the colours mean and how many players fall into each category

And here’s which leagues they’re playing in and some info on average and caps for Canada.

This is an attempt to create a baseline that can be re-visited. Initial takeaways for me are:

• We’re top heavy in MLS players with just under half our “top 30” playing in the league

• Goalkeeper is a concern in terms of high level international experience

• More players are experiencing a dip in form (according to me) than improving but the difference is marginal

• Jayden Nelson’s “big improvement” rating is generous and clearly has some recency bias as it’s based on one outstanding performance in his first MLS game this past weekend.

Keep buying Canadian made stuff.