Well, folks, let’s get the easy one over with.

I’m a Victorian myself. Victoria is a lovely little city with a large immigrant population and a climate that seems hand-crafted to the beautiful game. Grass grows all year ’round, properly watered. Rain isn’t as much a problem as in Vancouver, in spite of the stereotypes. And the Victoria Highlanders, an expansion USL Premier Development League team which played badly and missed the playoffs, drew splendidly for the USL PDL and had an average attendance that beat several USL Division One teams.

Also, the Highlanders’ owner once owned half the grocery stores on Vancouver Island, and is so rich he could keep the Canadian football blogosphere stocked in liquor for five or six minutes. Victoria’s attracted a few top-flight staff, including former Canadian national Colin Miller (recently departed to join his family running USL PDL Abbotsford).  The organization has made noise from day one about their USL-1 aspirations as soon as the Whitecaps move up.

Splendid! May as well take deposit on season tickets now!

Not so fast, hombre.

Victoria is a lovely city for USL-1, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a lovely location. When Portland and Vancouver join MLS in 2011, the USL won’t have any first- or second-division teams west of Minnesota. Road trips, particularly for teams like Puerto Rico, would be horrifying. Travel expenses would be stratospheric. Unless USL embarks on a program of general western expansion, the USL Highlanders would have to throw cash around like snow in a blizzard just to convince the other teams to let them in.

Stadia are a problem as well. Victoria has three mid-sized outdoor facilities that can host football matches: Centennial Stadium at the University of Victoria (grass, capacity 5,000), Royal Athletic Park in downtown Victoria (grass, capacity 4,247 but easily expandable), and the home of the Highlanders, the ironically named City Center Stadium way the fuck out in Langford (turf, 2,000-ish with standing room). City Center obviously won’t do without expansion, which is possible but only to a limited extent (plus, have I mentioned it’s way the fuck out in Langford?) Centennial Stadium is a dump, and not in the sense of “not enough concessions and the washrooms smell bad” but rather “if you see a memorable game you can pull your seat out of the crumbling concrete and take it home as a keepsake”.

Aside from building a new stadium, which is essentially impossible, Royal Athletic Park is the only long-term solution. 5,000 will get you started for USL-1 and it’s expandable to a tolerable capacity by putting bleachers on the north end, reaching 11,000 with temporary seats when it hosted matches for the U-20 World Cup. There isn’t enough on-site parking, but the parkades of downtown are close enough that you’re certain to find a spot if you’re willing to hike. Bus connections a block or two away are excellent.

Except, goddamn it,  Royal Athletic  Park is currently hosting a baseball team as well as the Pacific Coast Soccer League’s Victoria United. USL-1 teams have played on baseball grounds before but it’s probably everybody’s least favourite way to play football. Moreover, there’s been a considerable amount of money poured into Royal Athletic Park over the last eighteen months to make it more suitable for baseball. Pouring even more money into it to make it suitable for professional soccer probably won’t get council’s motor running.

The stadium issue is a stumbling block. It’s surmountable. The travel issue is another stumbling block. It’s also surmountable. The market can clearly handle USL-1-level soccer, drawing nearly 2,000 fans per night to watch shoddy amateurs, but two waist-high stumbling blocks may be enough to dissuade Highlanders owner Alex Campbell from trying. It’s significant that, since Portland had their bid to MLS officially accepted, there have been a lot fewer rumours about a USL-1 move coming from connected sources. Those in the Victoria soccer community who keep their ears close to the ground are more pessimistic now than they were when the Highlanders were just an ugly logo and people were wondering if five hundred paying fans would show up.

Halifax.

I just blew your mind, didn’t I?

The population of metropolitan Halifax is nearly 300,000. Weather is as mild as you can get in Canada east of Vancouver, allowing use of outdoor facilities throughout the North American season. On the East Coast, it is ideally located for USL-1’s current teams and would introduce very few scheduling complications. In spite of its low population, the city has no summer sports higher than the CIS level to compete with a USL-1 team. It’s a university town with plenty of the students and young professionals who traditionally form the lifeblood of a new football team in Canada. There’s even a workable stadium in place: Huskies Stadium is artificial turf, seats 4,000 permanently and can be expanded to 11,000. Though also home to a CIS football team, the turf pitch ought to be able to handle the rigour.

The closest thing to a reason to turn down Halifax is population: 300,000 in the metropolitan area isn’t that big. Halifax would be the third-smallest city in the USL Division One if it joined, behind only Charleston, South Carolina and Bayamón, Puerto Rico. But population has historically had only a small correlation with USL-1 success. Massive, immigrant-laden Miami can’t draw flies to watch their side while Puerto Rico may be the most successful team in the league.

Yet Halifax gets no buzz for a soccer team at any level. If one talks about summer sports in Halifax one is talking about the CFL, in spite of the fact that there’s no CFL-calibre stadium in the city and little prospect of building one. Halifax’s history with the CFL and its history with high-level soccer are identical: they don’t have one. It’s peculiar, though emblematic of the state of the game in this country, that you can’t swing a dead horse without hitting an article about CFL expansion while nobody considers the possibility that 4,000 university students might be drawn into watching twenty-odd soccer games a summer.

Remember, a USL-1 team, particularly one on the east coast which doesn’t need to build a stadium, hasn’t got huge overhead. Average attendance in USL-1 is under 5,000 fans a match. Halifax is a smaller city and not a traditional football market. But there’s no reason it couldn’t become the next big success story.

This is the first part of what I hope will be an ongoing series highlighting potential expansion markets for the USL Division One in Canada. With the Vancouver Whitecaps and probably the Montreal Impact on their way out but Ottawa likely on their way in, the time is right to build North America’s professional second tier north of the border. And with USL-1 clamouring for suitable markets to replace those being lost, we’ll never have a better opportunity.

Like so many cities in this country, Winnipeg has a checkered history of soccer success. Their only high-level team was the Winnipeg Fury of the old National Soccer League and bested the Vancouver 86ers 3-1 on aggregate to win the old Canadian Soccer League’s last championship in 1992. But the Fury folded with the CSL and Winnipeg fell out of the national soccer consciousness. Occasionally rumours surfaced of the new Canadian Soccer League being interested in the market, but the failure of the A-League in Edmonton and Calgary meant that Winnipeg looked a lot less attractive to patrons of the two higher divisions.

There have always been two gripes about Winnipeg as a soccer market. The first has been the lack of a stadium. Winnipeg has only three stadia capable of seating more than a thousand patrons: the University Stadium on the campus of the University of Manitoba, the Winnipeg Soccer Complex, and Canad Inns Stadium, home of the CFL’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Canad Inns, besides being booked by the Bombers for most of Winnipeg’s short outdoor season, is much too large to support a USL-1 team. University Stadium has the right capacity of 5,000 but is elderly, home to university football, and the pitch and grandstand are both in poor conditions. Winnipeg Soccer Complex has a capacity of 10,000, which is asking a lot from an expansion team in USL-1, although the Fury played there.

Luckily, times are changing on that front. Winnipeg businessman David Asper is in the process of buying the Blue Bombers and building them a new stadium, and part of the deal is that Asper is also financing renovations to University Stadium. Canad Inns will be knocked down for development, but the University of Manitoba football team will play at the new Blue Bombers stadium, significantly easing the pressure on a suddenly-viable University Stadium. With a natural grass pitch, dates available, and plenty of capacity for a team starting out, not to mention easy access, University Stadium is practically the dream field for a USL-1 expansion team.

If a hypothetical USL-1 team does well, of course, the Winnipeg Soccer Centre is available. But it seems too much to hope for that an expansion second-division team in a city without a recent football history will draw about 5,000 fans a match, and playing in the university allows for easier promotion to the students which make up so much of a club’s fanbase. It seems better to aim lower to begin with, but it is exciting that Winnipeg has stadia available on both the low and high ends of the spectrum.

The second traditional objection is location. Winnipeg’s nearest potential rival in USL-1 today is Minnesota and nobody else is within bus range. Unless a Winnipeg team is accompanied by a large Canadian expansion to Edmonton, Calgary, and possibly northern American sites, it would be difficult to deal with all the travel.

This will be an obstacle. But with so many traditional powerhouses already leaving USL-1, it’s an obstacle that the United Soccer Leagues would have to deal with one way or another. If anything, having Winnipeg as a central link may make their expansion plans easier: it’s a lot more tenable for Puerto Rico to go on a road trip to Victoria if they also play Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Bismarck on their way through.

Would there be viable ownership in Winnipeg? There are men in Winnipeg with money and ambition, but nobody who’s shown interest in soccer. Until the Asper sale, even the Blue Bombers were owned by the city, and no Canadian needs a lesson on what unstable ownership did to the Winnipeg Jets. This is probably Winnipeg’s largest question  mark. But an entrepreneur able to lose money in the very short term and with an itch to become a player in the community could do a lot worse than to look for a USL-1  team, and the USL would be very wise to give it to him.

Remember all that drama on the BC Place renovations potentially being cancelled? Ah, those were good times. People were panicking, there was a thread on the Southsiders board titled “could our mls dreams be over?” that ran to five pages, there was all sorts of conjecture that the BC Liberals were going to throw the renovations into the can because if there’s anything that British Columbia politicians are known for, it’s fiscal restraint and not buying goodies for downtown Vancouver.

Adding to the ridiculous furore was that BC Place already has a roof. It’s an awful roof, essentially a balloon stretched the concrete block of the stadium, but it keeps rain off unless it bursts, which only happens once in a while. The three advantages of a new roof for the Whitecaps would be that it is retractable, it would allow them to curtain off and conceal the upper decks, turning a cavernous 60,000-seat pillbox into an intimate stadium of 28,000 seats or so, and that it probably won’t kill anybody.

In the renovation package for BC Place approved in January, the roof was pegged at $200 million of the $365 million total cost, all for a stadium that was built for $126 million 1981 dollars. The renderings of the renovated BC Place are attractive, but we’re left with the fact that if the renovations go forward British Columbia taxpayers are paying just south of $400 million to renovate a football stadium to no obvious benefit.

The renovations have little to do with the Olympics and most of them (including the roof) couldn’t possibly be ready by the opening ceremonies. And even if you’re one of the dwindling number of observers who believe that publicly-financed stadia pay for themselves by stimulating growth, it’s even harder to argue that a new roof and nicer concessions for an existing building will have any positive effect.

Best of all, this government boondoggle is being shoved down the Whitecaps’ throats. They don’t actually want the stadium: Whitecaps owner Greg Kerfoot has spent several years trying to build a privately-funded stadium in downtown Vancouver near the Burrard Inlet.

Unfortunately, the Whitecaps Waterfront Stadium bid has been marred by large, well-financed organizations of concerned citizens that don’t actually have any concerned citizens in them as well as Vancouver’s usual population of hippies and kooks who oppose anybody making money off of anything ever. Kerfoot’s proposed site for the stadium, pictured to the left currently houses a parking lot and a helicopter landing pad near some railway tracks, which isn’t anyone’s idea of the Spirit of Old Gastown.

For some reason, although BC Place is a taxpayer-funded scam that is home to the much more popular BC Lions as well as MLS Vancouver, the Whitecaps seem to come in for a unique amount of abuse. The newspaper of Douglas College, displaying the sort of editorial insight and keen journalistic intellect that has been associated with campus newspapers since the dawn of time, ran a satirical article saying that the Whitecaps had eleven fans and they were all drunk drivers. That’s just offensive. If I wrote a post saying that Toronto FC fans were a bunch of Johnny-come-lately types with no interest in the game beyond the south stands at BMO Field, I’m sure somebody would call me out on it.

Objections have included the idea of the Whitecaps tearing down Crab Park (which the proposal doesn’t include, specifically setting the limits to the stadium outside of the park so all the druggies from the Downtown Eastside won’t be disturbed), environmental damage (what, is the stadium being made of uranium and puppy corpses? This isn’t a steel mill.), and, in a few particularly inspired cases, the objection that since Greg Kerfoot is an investor in Vancouver’s Edgewater Casino and therefore those dastardly Whitecaps will secretly slip a casino into this stadium without anybody knowing (seriously).

It’s also said by people who actually have jobs that traffic and spectator density will be an issue. Why this isn’t an issue for the home of the Canucks (GM Place), which is within walking distance, or the million-odd people who commute into downtown every day goes unexplained. Also, nobody is nice enough to mention how having BC Place hosting the Whitecaps in a slightly different part of downtown Vancouver is suddenly much better. Possibly the same magic traffic fairies who brought us “Sure, Let’s Tear Up Granville Street To Build a Subway Line, That Won’t Inconvenience Anybody For Three Years” will take care of this.

The stadium was originally planned to be located near Vancouver’s Waterfront Station over former Canadian Pacific Railway property. The Whitecaps own this site (marked as #1 on the map to the left) but the location was determined to be impractical, causing the Whitecaps to negotiate with the Port Authority for another site directly on the water, nearby the original location but involving the reclamation of some land and the demolition of the Seabus terminal (site #2). Because of the impact on the Seabus and port traffic, negotiations have since moved to another location directly east of that site (#3). The Vancouver port authority has been the main obstacle for getting the stadium approved, but they’ve at least been negotiating (the hot rumour is a land swap between the Whitecaps and the port authority). BC Place is shown to the left as #4, for reference. The distance between the left and right edges of the map is about 1.83 kilometers.

The waterfront location has a number of advantages. Environmentalists and transit wonks should be enthusastic, as it is located almost on top of the Waterfront public transit exchange where the three Skytrain lines, the commuter West Coast Express train, and a bundle of bus routes all intersect. The second plan would have mutilated the Seabus service, but this has been mercifully corrected. The waterfront stadium would be adjacent to Crab Park, but forty-year-old Swangard Stadium is located in Burnaby’s Central Park and so far the park has not been burned down in an alcohol-fueled orgy of destruction. Moreover, unlike western Burnaby, there are a number of taverns and restaurants in Gastown that would benefit from the increased business of a waterfront stadium, and the area is accustomed to handling a large number of revelers.

Ultimately there is no reason not to let the Whitecaps build a stadium on the Vancouver waterfront. The real concerns about earlier proposals have been ironed out, and what’s left is a combination of groundless fearmongering and knee-jerk armchair fascism saying that Private Property is Bad and that we must be careful lest an addict-riddled park be marred by people actually enjoying it. The alternative is a ridiculously expensive and largely unnecessary stadium project being thrust upon an already overtaxed public that will enjoy absolutely zero return on investment.

So it’s only natural that British Columbia is so far taking the insane route.

Arsenal striker Eduardo: dives, not carded by the official, suspended two games after the fact.

Sheffield United defender Chris Morgan: nearly murders Iain Hume in cold blood with a ruthless, deliberate elbow to the head, not carded by the official, FA utterly dismisses the possibility of post-match sanction.

Yeah, that’s about right.

It’s a peculiarity of the Canadian game that, while football was practically the seminal working-class sport in all the old footballing powers, here true enjoyment of the game is largely limited to the upper and middle classes. Except for those lucky souls living in Vancouver, Montreal, or Toronto, attending a high-level match in this country requires a considerable investment of both time and money, to say nothing of the cost of truly being a supporter.

A Southsider in Victoria I know manages to get to the majority of Whitecaps home games every year. He does this by hopping on a float plane (ticket cost $120) from Victoria’s Inner Harbour, flying to Vancouver, going to a game, staying overnight with his parents, returning by ferry – unless he has to work early, in which case back on the float plane. And that’s just from Victoria to Vancouver; a trip that thousands make every day. I, personally, am going to the Vancouver – Puerto Rico match at Swangard Stadium on Saturday: staying one night (since the ferry doesn’t run late enough to catch after the match) in the cheapest hotel practical will mean that one game will cost me an entire weekend and about $120.

Southsiders who ask why I don’t go to many matches? That’s why!

And I have it easy! Imagine being in Winnipeg, with your nearest Canadian team above the college level being the Premier Development League’s Thunder Bay Chill. Or in Edmonton, where your home team would be in Abbotsford, British Columbia.

This is a large part of the reason I support the Canadian men’s national team playing in as many cities as practical. Yes, the support in Toronto is superb, but if we play all our matches in the east the result is that western Canada won’t give a hoot. Football is the canonical example of a sport that is better live than on television, and no number of 1080p broadcasts and imported British announcers on the allegedly Canadian Broadcasting Corporation will change that. There’s a world of difference between a Calgarian seeing Toronto FC take on FC Real United or whatever and having a team to cheer for in his hometown, if only for a day.

This is also why, even if Montreal and Vancouver move on to greener pastures, I desperately cheer for the USL Division 1 to remain competitive. There will always be cities which won’t support MLS, and USL Division 1 is perfect for the Edmontons of the world (I’ve written about Edmonton’s A-League experience elsewhere on this site). Barring a remarkable change in the very structure of the league, the Canadian Soccer League will never fill that role. It will be up to either a Canadian league conceived from the ground up as a USL-1 replacement, or we will once again have to rely on the Americans.

So I should be happy with the much-reported news that Jeff Hunt and the gang in Ottawa are getting a USL Division One expansion team. Ottawa is already served by the Fury of the USL Premier Development League, but they are by and by large ignored by capital city citizens. The average attendance of the Fury in 2009 was 495 fans a night, the highest season total in franchise history. Compare this to another oft-rumoured USL-1 destination, Victoria, where the expansion Highlanders averaged 1,750 fans per game, according to the club.

The Ottawa USL franchise will have an uphill battle from the start. They’ll have an unusual amount of local competition for a Canadian football club, with MLS’s Toronto FC and the soon-to-be-MLS Montreal Impact a day trip by rail for the discriminating football fanatic. There are very few parts of the country that can be said to be well-served by football, but Jeff Hunt will try to give it a go in one of them. Moreover, Ottawa discards sports franchises like most people discard lovers, with only the Senators and Hunt’s 67’s showing any long-term success.

For all of the success in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, Canada is a young football market in many ways. The A-League’s Toronto Lynx were notoriously poorly supported, aside from the diehards in U-Sector, and only the prestige of Major League Soccer shook Toronto’s dormant football fandom from its post-Blizzard slumber. The Whitecaps were always successful but have only recently started selling out 5,288-seat Swangard Stadium on a regular basis. The Impact were the anchor of the A-League for most of its history but their ticket numbers are dipping.

Meanwhile, failures in Edmonton and Calgary in the 1990s scuttled A-League and USL-1 expansion into Canada for over a decade. We forget that when the Aviators joined the league, there was talk of expansion across Canada; possibly an entire Canadian division. Plagued by bad ownership, both Calgary and Edmonton folded in disgrace and the continuing success in Montreal and Vancouver did nothing to persuade USL-1’s administrators and prospective investors to take another chance. Ottawa’s failure may have the same cooling affect, a general shrug, “only immigrants care about soccer in Canada, so you can only have it in the big cities”, and further obscurity for most of the country.

Jeff Hunt has been using the USL-1 idea essentially as a carrot to persuade Ottawa to approve his stadium proposal. He never comes off as a football fan; never looked like he really cared about USL-1 beyond its immediate money-making potential. Well, USL-1 doesn’t make much money for most of its owners, and if Hunt pulls his backing it will be a disaster for the whole country. Let’s hope that Hunt is in it for real.