Record crowd for Montreal Impact home opener shows how far Canadian soccer’s come

Just over five years ago, Canadian soccer was largely an afterthought on both the national sporting scene and the North American landscape. That's changed remarkably, as Canada now has three Major League Soccer teams, and their individual profiles have risen along with the overall profile of MLS. The Montreal Impact drew 58,912 loud and passionate fans to their home opener against the Chicago Fire at Olympic Stadium Saturday (which ended in a 1-1 draw), and that marked a perfect conclusion to a stunning couple of weeks that saw over 125,000 Canadian soccer fans turn out for three games in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, with further hundreds of thousands tuning in on television. Canadian soccer has come a long way in half a decade, and there are signs that it may not have reached the top yet.

Back in March 2007, a Canadian team had never played an MLS game. There had been tremendous highs for Canadian soccer during the days of the old North American Soccer League in the 1970s and 1980s, with both Toronto and Vancouver claiming championships, but the story since then had been less positive. The Impact and the Vancouver Whitecaps hung on in lower divisions, and a revolving cast of other teams also competed, but Canada had been on the outside looking in of MLS, the current top level of North American professional soccer, since the league's founding in 1996. With Toronto FC joining MLS as an expansion club in April 2007, the Whitecaps making the move from Division II in 2011 and the Impact following this season, Canada now has three clubs at the top level. Moreover, all of those clubs have received solid fan support so far, especially recently, and they've helped in turn to boost the profile of MLS.

MLS commissioner Don Garber was interviewed at halftime of TSN's broadcast of the Impact-Fire match Saturday, and he said the fan support Montreal drew is just a further illustration of how MLS expansion to Canada is working beyond even the league's expectations.

"It's another great historic day for the sport, and particularly for the sport in Canada," he said. "When we first started, I don't think we'd ever believed we'd see it like this."

The Impact-Fire game wrapped up an incredible two weeks for Canadian soccer. It all started with Toronto FC holding the reigning MLS champion Los Angeles Galaxy to a 2-2 draw before a sold-out crowd of 47,658 at the Rogers Centre in the first leg of their CONCACAF Champions League quarterfinal March 7. The Whitecaps then beat the Impact 2-0 before a sold-out crowd of 21,000 in their own home opener last Saturday (which was watched by a Canadian MLS-record audience of 541,000 on TSN and RDS). TFC then pulled off perhaps the most impressive result of all the Canadian clubs, winning the second leg against the Galaxy 2-1 in Los Angeles to advance to the semifinals, and Montreal followed that up by pulling in a crowd of 58,912 (a Montreal record for soccer, and a Canadian record for an MLS game, but not quite the Canadian soccer record of 60,342, set by the NASL Whitecaps against Seattle in 1983) for their draw against a solid Fire team Saturday. With so many impressive moments both on and off the pitch, it's no wonder that Garber sounded pretty thrilled about the state of soccer in Canada Saturday.

"There are things here that really excite us," he said.

The Canadian teams are far from the only factor in MLS' rise, of course. New teams like the Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers (both also with a strong history of success at the lower levels) have brought tremendous fan support, and established franchises such as the Fire and the Galaxy have been finding plenty of off-field success lately as well. The Canadian squads and their passionate followers have played a substantial role, though, and with three Canadian teams now in the league, success in Canada will be vital to the success of MLS.

However, there have been plenty of moments falsely billed as turning points for Canadian (and North American) soccer in the past, and the reality is that sustained on- and off-field success is more crucial than a few record-breaking days. Garber recognizes that, and he said it's more important to keep pressing hard than to declare any given day as a turning point for North American soccer.

"We've got to keep it going," he said. "Let's just continue to get it going and keep moving on before thinking we've cracked the code."

He said that the league's key focus is on building up the quality of play, and the best way to do that is with developing strong talent through youth programs. Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal have all developed solid academy systems, and Garber said expanding academy efforts across the league while improving facilities will be crucial to MLS' future.

"It's about raising the quality of play, investing in our youth programs, building up our facilities," he said.

That future will include more teams, but for now, it doesn't look like that will be in Canada. MLS is actively looking at adding a 20th team right now, and the leader there is a second New York club. If that doesn't work out, though, Garber rightly pointed out that there are large segments of the U.S. (particularly the South) where the league could use more of a presence, and the success of lower-level teams in areas like Carolina and Tampa Bay could eventually lead to expansion there.

Canadian expansion appears to be on the backburner for now, but that doesn't mean it won't eventually happen, though; FC Edmonton's doing well in the tier-II North American Soccer League, and with a few more years of success there, perhaps that city could be a target for MLS expansion. Ottawa might eventually be a fit, too, as that city's targeting a tier-II team and could perhaps move up if that works out well enough, and from a population perspective, Calgary might be worth investigating as well. All that's a ways down the road, though, and for now, it falls to the Impact, Whitecaps and TFC to carry the Canadian soccer banner in MLS. If the past two weeks are any indication, they're doing a solid job of it.