Opinion | Canada’s first women’s pro soccer league is making progress. A rousing World Cup run would help

The game was played on the other side of the world, mid-morning in Toronto, so the broadcast slot wasn’t exactly prime time. But when Canada’s women’s soccer team last played in a top-level international competition — specifically the final of the Tokyo Olympics in the summer of 2021 — the viewership numbers were impressive.

A peak audience of some 4.4 million Canadians took in Julia Grosso’s gold-medal-winning penalty kick on that fateful August Friday, according to CBC, making it the most-watched event of the Tokyo Games in this country. It amounted to another compelling brick in the wall of evidence that elite women’s sports, done right, are not only a great national rallying point but a compelling business proposition.

So you’ll excuse Diana Matheson if she’ll be cheering especially hard for Canada when the FIFA Women’s World Cup kicks off this week in Australia and New Zealand. It wasn’t long ago that Matheson, the 39-year-old from Oakville, was a linchpin member of the team, competing in four World Cups and scoring the landmark bronze-medal-winning goal at the 2012 Olympics before retiring in 2021. More recently, Matheson has rebranded herself as one of the entrepreneurial spirits behind a Canadian women’s professional soccer league slated to kick off in 2025.

So she’s not simply supporting women’s soccer. She’s in the business of selling it.

“The longer Canada stays in the tournament, the more folks are talking about women’s soccer, it’s good for us,” Matheson said.

Indeed, more than seven months after Matheson first announced plans for Project 8 — the working title of the eight-team league founded by Matheson and business partner Thomas Gilbert — there’s still plenty of work to be done. While teams are spoken for in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, and the announcement of a fourth team is expected in the coming months, Matheson said there are four markets very much available for purchase. All that’s required is a passion for the sport, not to mention a franchise fee of $1 million, plus an estimated $8 million to $10 million to get a new owner (or owners) through the first five years in business. While Matheson said the league will ultimately sell to “the right ownership group, regardless of gender,” she said there’s a hope female investors will figure prominently in the league’s rise.

“These aren’t billion-dollar franchises, and there’s only four markets here we’re looking to sell and then that’s it,” Matheson said. “So if people want to get in, there’s a limited time here.”

If the new Canadian league even remotely follows the trajectory of the U.S.-based National Women’s Soccer League, the ground-floor investment could prove prescient. Matheson remembered that when the NWSL began a little more than a decade ago, the cash infusion required was measured in the hundreds of thousands. Earlier this year, the league collected a $53-million (U.S.) expansion fee to add a San Francisco-based team to the fold.

Which is hardly a suggestion that a Canadian league, for all the burgeoning interest and investment in women’s sports around the world, is guaranteed to be such a success. The NWSL is finding its feet 11 years into its existence, but it’s worth remembering it rose from the collapse of at least two U.S.-based predecessors.

And as Matheson pointed out in a recent interview, Canada is a different place with vast geography and a relatively small population base. The most successful Canadian men’s pro sports teams, as massive as they are, have always been arms of U.S.-based behemoths. Which is part of the reason why, as recently as five years ago, Matheson said she saw NWSL expansion to Canada as an attractive next step for the women’s game.

But the picture has changed. For one, the NWSL has become cost prohibitive. For another, Matheson said that even if Canada could quickly wrangle one or two teams — and presuming the NWSL imposed a maximum number of Canadian players on each squad — the result would mean insufficient domestic opportunities for a country with the world’s third-largest player pool, Matheson said.

For women’s pro soccer to truly work in this country, she said it requires what most every other serious soccer nation already possesses: a domestic league creating pathways for players, coaches and referees across the country. That Canada Soccer, the national governing body, has been mired in a financial crisis that’s led to ugly and public squabbles with players “hasn’t helped us,” Matheson acknowledged. Still, Canada Soccer is expected to be a key financial backer of the new league, which also counts Air Canada, Canadian Tire, CIBC and DoorDash among its corporate partners.

“Canadian teams operating in an American league is very North American, but it’s simply not the way global soccer works. It’s not how our sport works,” Matheson said. “The more time you spend thinking about it, a Canadian league is just exponentially more impactful.”

So on it goes, the push to bootstrap something essentially unprecedented. The actual name of the league, still to be workshopped, is expected to be made public early next year. Teams (four in the East, four in the West) will ideally play in stadiums with capacity between 6,000 and 8,000. There are plans for a 28-game schedule that will include a couple of centralized events per season in which East and West will meet in one location to minimize cross-country travel.

Matheson said that as much as the world has changed for the better around women’s sports, her new enterprise is still battling old thinking.

“You know, ‘No one watches women’s sport’ or ‘Women’s sport doesn’t make money.’ It’s stuff we all grew up with, right?” Matheson said. “So it’s pretty ingrained … (But) we’re at a point now, fortunately, where the conversation has shifted. The culture has shifted and there’s data to (rebuke) a lot of these myths and biases.”

While Matheson said the sales pitch on investing in a women’s sports used to be about principles — as in, it’s the right thing to do — that’s no longer the salient argument.

“It’s still the right thing to do,” said Matheson, who is making the case that, according to her data, it’s also the smart thing.

“When you start to dig into the numbers, the investment case is pretty obvious,” she said. “Women’s soccer is growing quicker than men’s. We’re really only 20 years into the women’s professional sport industry, so it’s really a new industry. And it’s going to keep growing.”

What’s expected to be the most-watched Women’s World Cup in history, with FIFA projecting global viewership of about two billion, has the potential to be another accelerant. That is, a long and prosperous run by Canada’s No. 7-ranked team, which begins play Thursday, could do wonders for the dream of a national pro league.

“It would be icing on the cake,” Matheson said of a successful Canadian run. “I think the more excitement and buzz there is around women’s soccer in the country, it’s better for us.”

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