I am outrageously, preposterously jealous of you Americans right now.

I’ve been in a bar with a bunch of fellow revellers when Canada’s national soccer team scored a dramatic stoppage time goal to snatch a draw from a loss, and that was pretty good. But all evening long I’ve been watching videos like this and just staring, soullessly, my heart hardly daring a single beat lest the blood rush to my brain and turn me into a seething, sobbing mess of angry sorrow.

Yes, I’m cheering for the Americans in the World Cup. That’s out of principle, not out of affection. I could no more take pleasure in these sublime, primal outbursts of joy for a team that is not my own than I could feel love and awe towards somebody else’s newborn child. And I know that, even when I am at my most optimistic, when I am looking at cheering New Zealanders in South Africa and declaring in 2014 that’ll be us there’s essentially no chance I’ll be able to savour Canada’s getting to the round of sixteen in my lifetime.

I’m still cheering for the Americans, of course. But now I’m sort of depressed about it.

Last night, sitting in my office, I put up a somewhat agitated post on Twitter. “Okay, FC Edmonton,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. If you draw Colo-Colo or better, I’ll get on the bandwagon. NOT ONE SECOND EARLIER.”

Well, they lost. Yet here I am. World Cup? What’s that?

FC Edmonton being what it is, there was no broadcast of any sort of the game, be it audio or video, online or otherwise. Updates came courtesy FC Edmonton’s own Twitter account and, after the fact, eyewitness reports in Edmonton newspapers and on the Voyageurs forum. The Edmonton Journal buried their article on the game to the extent that it doesn’t even show up on their soccer page. You had to be looking to see anything about this, and judging from the announced crowd of only 5,573 not that many people were looking. The crowd was predominantly Chilean, cheering on Colo-Colo with full voice, while the nascent FC Edmonton supporters section received the odd looks and ignorant comments that is the lot of any trace of supporters’ culture in this country.

With fewer than 6,000 fans the club can’t be anywhere near breaking even on the million dollar payroll and the million dollars they spent bringing Colo-Colo to town (Terry Jones of the Edmonton Sun estimates the club’s loss on the match at “well into six figures“). Moreover, Colo-Colo has replaced FC Edmonton as Vitória’s friendly opponent, allegedly on account of a team in eastern Canada welshing on a friendly with the Chileans and the club having guaranteed Colo-Colo three matches in Canada. To the extent that these friendlies are being held to prepare the team for a 2011 campaign, they are doomed to be a bit less effective now.

That’s the obligatory FC Edmonton bad news. For once, though, the good news outweighs it. First and foremost is FC Edmonton’s play. Thrashing the Montreal Impact reserves 3-0 was impressive, if hardly earth-shattering. But a 4-3 loss to Colo-Colo do the Edmontonians even more credit. It was Colo-Colo’s first game of their 2010-11 campaign, and it showed, but it doesn’t take away from the result. The game was somewhat sloppy and the Chilean champions were hardly overexerting themselves on the turf of Commonwealth Stadium, but all the same by all accounts FC Edmonton played them hard, took an early lead, and endured the Chilean fightback with great composure. The club has been bolstered by a few additional players, including former Ajax trainee and Canadian youth player Matt Lam, and while it’s hard to judge form without actually seeing the team there appears to be nothing but good news.

You’d have to be awfully optimistic to believe the great play will continue, of course. Phillip Araos of Colo-Colo bluntly said that he’d watched FC Edmonton practice and they weren’t that good. Their rosters of aging Dutchmen, a few promising players, and metro league plugs is still the same roster, even if Matt Lam has lent it some more skill and legitimacy. Nobody disputes that Dwight Lodeweges is a good coach but if he can mold that unit into something that’ll be competitive at the NASL level he’s a bloody miracle worker. But two games in they don’t seem to be as bad as the naysayers – and I was a very loud one – were saying.

Moreover, the attendance, while disappointing, is hardly devastating. The friendly schedule was only announced two and a half weeks ago, so there wasn’t a great deal of time for big ticket sales to materialize. 2,106 fans came through the gates of Foote Field for Edmonton’s first friendly against the Impact reserves, a Wednesday evening game against a completely inglorious opponent.  This isn’t a fantastic number but it was more than the opening night draws of USSF D2 Carolina, Miami, and Baltimore and the 2010 averages of Miami, Baltimore, and Minnesota. If FC Edmonton draws 2,100 fans a night in 2011, they won’t make money but they won’t be the NSC Minnesota Stars either. When the team is playing real games against real teams and has some publicity from their friendly season, though, attendance should increase.

Best of all, even with the financial dunking they’ve taken so far the owners seem non-plussed. In Terry Jones’s article linked above, co-owner Tom Fath seems at ease, if not exactly falling over himself with joy. Things are not going that well. FC Edmonton is by no means a certain success. But there have been a few small victories, and every great movement starts somewhere.

My attitude towards diving is shared by many of you. I hate it, except when my team does it.

Well, perhaps I should refine that statement a bit. My team doesn’t dive, you see. Each flop, each plunge into the grass, was clearly entirely the fault of that blatant foul by the opposition and not at all by our enthusiastic player gunning for a whistle in a vulnerable area. What would appear to the untrained eye to be shameless embellishment is simply an elite athlete being thrown off his balance by a less talented ruffian who’s probably trying to end his career with unprovoked dirty play.

So I guess I can understand the reaction of Italian supporters to this morning’s World Cup fixture, when Daniele De Rossi had his shirt tugged by kiwi Tommy Smith to pull him backwards and reacted by hurdling forwards as if a mine had gone off in a bad war film. “Well, by the letter of the law, the shirt tug was a foul,” they say. By the letter of the law De Rossi should have received a yellow card for embellishment so incompetent he couldn’t even fall in the right direction, but that’s a distraction from the real issue. A rational person would say that whatever harm little shirt tugs cause to the game, it is nothing compared to the harm of awarding a dozen penalties and two dozen free kicks in a World Cup match because you decided to call “the letter of the law”. But if referee Carlos Batres wanted to call the Laws of the Game for ninety minutes then, well, good luck to him!

Except, of course, that Carlos Batres didn’t call the Laws of the Game for ninety minutes. He called one little tug and ignored the rest from both sides. Not a single card for simulation (and not even the most biased observer could deny there was diving a-plenty in that match). After sustaining a knock, he sent New Zealand centre back and captain Ryan Nelsen off for treatment then immediately issued him a yellow card for timewasting, which… was a new one on me. One can hardly blame the Italians for embellishing every little thing, since the referee was so clearly overwhelmed by the occasion. Were I in that position, I can’t deny wanting Canada to flop like eleven red fish. But what an infuriating game to watch! New Zealand robbed of what ought to have been a 1-0 win by something that has no place in this game, celebrating a famous draw against the defending world champions and yet an even greater triumph has been stolen from them by perfidious officiating..

New Zealand still has a chance to advance to the knock-out stages and immortality. On form, Slovakia could beat Italy and New Zealand could draw Paraguay. Neither is likely but both are possible. Even if they go down without further ado, they’ll have made their statement. Nobody is laughing at Oceania now, but they could have been gaping in awe. The sooner we can replace referees, the happier we all shall be.

Perhaps you heard. Switzerland beat Spain, 1-0. Oh, of course you heard. The Swiss did exactly what you’d expect a team considered part of the tournament’s dregs to do against a team considered a major favourite, and played defense as if their lives depended on it. There was flair and competence in the Swiss transition game, particularly courtesy the consummately underrated Tranquillo Barnetta, and Seattle’s Blaise Nkufo did Switzerland, MLS, and for that matter his home country of Zaire proud with a sterling display of Ali Gerba-esque holding play and athletic attacking football. The defense was, of course, the centre of affairs, limiting the Spaniards to a large number of relatively tame outside chances and cutting out the cross almost every time. When a ball did get through, Spain’s strikers lacked the alacrity to put the opportunity home, perhaps worn down from running and their rough treatment from the Swiss defense.

It was a clinic from Switzerland on how to play against an inferior opponent. Hold back, limit their real opportunities, and when the counter comes snatch it. In spite of their defensive posture the Swiss generated chances of their own and wore out the Spaniards by forcing them to track back even when desperate for a goal, simply because their midfield was making the right pass and moving the play quickly rather than getting fancy.

Yet that wasn’t what the buzz was about. “Boring”. “Lucky”. Even I gave in to a moment of weakness and said that if Jose Mourinho was watching this Swiss team they’d be all right by him. It wasn’t that much of an insult coming from me, since I loved watching Mourinho’s Inter team. Particularly when they were playing Barcelona or another team that should rightfully kick the shit out of them: now that’s how you play as a team. I actually enjoyed the UEFA Champions League this year for the first time in I don’t know how long, and this from a guy who usually hates high-level European football.

How can that be boring? Certainly, incompetent defensive play is boring. Playing ten men behind the ball, getting possession, and promptly hoofing it up the pitch? I could not possibly have less time for that. Luckily, there’s a natural limit on that sort of play and that is a team playing that style usually loses. If you give up possession freely and panic when you get it back you will not win. It doesn’t matter if the other team has the ball 60% of the time so long as you make something with your 40%. Even in this morning’s game, around the eightieth minute when Swiss legs were getting tired and the Spanish attack was coming in waves and Switzerland was letting their excitement get the best of their intellect, we saw the Spanish grow significantly more dangerous. The weary Swiss were abandoning the transition game that had served them so well and started flailing and kicking it as hard as they could, and the Spanish were beginning to pick them up. But for a few botched finishes by Villa and Torres, it would have been a 1-1 draw. At least a 1-1 draw. All because the Swiss lost what had made them effective in the first place.

I love watching that sort of game and I’m surprised more people don’t agree with me. You can’t become a soccer fan if the only thing you like is scoring and Kaka dancing around guys, because none of that happens real often. Most soccer fans are not only conscious but appreciative of the finer nuances of the game, because if you couldn’t appreciate that sort of thing you wouldn’t get into soccer in the first place. And Switzerland, or at least Switzerland’s first seventy-odd minutes, was a testament to those finer nuances. Jamming the obvious crossing lanes so that when Xavi unleashed one of his patented crosses at speed there was a Swiss head right there to meet it. Making the strikers fight to even get into the box, wearing them down and reducing their enthusiasm to make those increasingly futile runs for crosses that seemed never to arrive. Taking their time when they could and as soon as Spain overcommitted bam, there was the counter, and it was just two Swiss players running forward but they seemed to have all the space and time in the world and they made the more talented Spaniards work like dogs to get that ball back.

That is soccer. You won’t see it in a shoe commercial, in one of those artificial fantasy lands where famous midfielders run through explosions and do karate moves on the ball, but the last thing those commercials sell is “soccer”. You’ll see it on every pitch around the world where two competent teams clash. We shouldn’t complain about a well-played game just because that magnificent play doesn’t bulge the onion bag as often.

Australia and Canada have a lot in common. Mid-sized, mature former British colonies, once culturally isolated but now tied more and more into the world village. They share an ambivalent attitude towards their past and many of their traditions. They share many ambitions, including a disproportionate desire to punch above their weight in international sports. Australia’s been rather more successful in most summer sports and Canada rather better in most winter sports, which is pretty much what you’d expect if you based your expectations on climate and culture. But their soccer teams have a common thread as well, and that is a recent humiliation on the international soccer stage.

Canada’s came in May, in Buenos Aires for the Victoria Day Massacre. 5-0 we went down to Argentina and it was every bit as ugly as the scoreline would suggest. One of the first Canadian friendlies in many years to be nationally telecast, it advertised to the entire country just how far we had to go before we could compete with the elite soccer nations. There was some promise there, a few young players who looked poised, a few old players who looked dreadful but are mercifully on their way out. There were no excuses, though. We saw what happened and we took our medicine. Many of us even expected such a debacle.

Australia’s came this very day in South Africa. They went down 4-0 to Germany and oh, it could have been worse than that if Germany had cashed some of the five-bell chances that went wanting. This time it was on display for the entire world to see, in front of one of the largest audiences Australian soccer would have ever known. Their record defeat of 8-0 actually came against South Africa (fifty years ago) so it is fitting that it would be the site of their greatest, if not most numerically significant, loss.

But Australia has an asterisk. Mexican referee Marco Antonio Rodríguez lost the plot in the second half, missing what seemed to be an obvious penalty on an accidental German hand ball and then minutes later having star Tim Cahill sent off with a straight red for a foul that appeared to be a reckless yellow at best. Rodríguez also booked midfielder Carl Valeri for seemingly nothing at all, although he let Valeri get away with a yellow-card tackle later as though to even accounts. This isn’t news from a CONCACAF referee, who are nowhere near the standards of UEFA or CONMEBOL and never have been. It would take both a cynic and a fool to think that the fix was in, as Germany was already leading 2-0 when the calls became sketchy and Australia seemed to have no chance of fighting back.

Yes, Australia looked very nearly as bad against Germany as Canada is said to have looked against Argentina. There was a brief flash from the Socceroos in the first ten minutes but from there on it was one-way German traffic. On Lukas Podolski’s opening goal the Australian defense was caught running to the ball like a team of thirteen-year-olds rather than picking up their men and at all times the passes from what is not a particularly talented German team sliced the Australians to pieces. Australia stuck to formation far too rigidly and played with the energy, enthusiasm, and incompetence of amateurs against professionals. In no sense did Australia pick up even an iota of credit for this game when they had all eleven men on the pitch, and as soon as Cahill was sent off what coherence and ability there was dissolved into a melange of frantic, futile individualism.

The discussion will inevitably surround Rodríguez’s decisions, because that’s what discussion does. Without Cahill and with humiliation burning in their minds, it would take a brave man to predict an Australian point against a surprisingly strong-looking Ghana side. And the great peril for Australian soccer is that the controversy will overshadow just how poorly they played.

Every so often, the lesser powers such as Australia need a reminder of how far they have to come. Canada got their wakeup call against Argentina and may well emerge better for it. Indeed, since that resounding defeat we’ve heard that Junior Hoilett is more enthusiastic about representing Canada and the “B” team played a strong, unusually coherent game against Venezuela. It’s early yet but so far in spite of the lopsided result Canada is coming out of Argentina better than they went in. And everybody in the Canadian soccer world, from Dr. Dominic Maestracci to the lowliest fan, knows how much improvement we require and can dispel any illusions about “misused talent” that may have lingered from the Dale Mitchell era.

Will Australia be so fortunate? Will they concentrate on refereeing robbing them of a penalty and their best player instead of the dreadful play that put them in a position to need that penalty and that game against Ghana so desperately? Early indications are that the referee is the talking point. Let’s hope for the sake of our kinsmen down under that sober second thought produces more productive reflection.

The press, or at least the parts of the press that I frequent, have been abuzz with reports of a new CONCACAF World Cup qualification scheme to be introduced for the 2014 cycle. There are various ideas that various media outlets have been reporting are absolutely certain and placed before FIFA for approval, and as is so often the case everybody is convinced that their source is telling them the One True Way CONCACAF will end up running the show. The only thing that we know for certain is that, if CONCACAF can make its case before the big bosses at FIFA, qualifying for the 2014 World Cup will be vastly different than qualifying for 2010 was.

It’s hard to see this as anything but a good thing. There are two new systems we’re prominently hearing about: one would run each team through three groups of four, progressively narrowing the field and moving the top two in each group on to the next round. In this scenario, a middle power like Canada would face a first group with one other good team (like Mexico) and a couple of real runts, a second round slightly weaker than today’s third round (as there would be four groups rather than three), and a final round slightly weaker than the hex but still nothing to sneeze about.

The other possibility is as horrifying as it is amazing: after a perfunctory qualification process to narrow the field down to twelve teams, the survivors would be thrown into one big pool and left to slug it out. As the current CONCACAF third round divides the teams into three groups of four, we can assume that Canada would be left to play its quadrennial home-and-away against some Caribbean country and then spend the next fourteen months trying to beat the hell out of every decent soccer power on the continent. The press doesn’t mention an equivalent to the current first round in either proposal but there’d have to be one: somewhere where Antigua and Haiti could go to war and something Canada would probably rank high enough to avoid.

CONCACAF’s World Cup qualifying system is infamously shambolic, condemning all but the six teams qualifying for the hex to a short season of meaningful games followed by an awfully long slate of idle misery. Canada knows a thing or two about this, having been on the outside looking in for the 2010 qualifying hex. And the 2006 qualifying hex. And the 2002 qualifying hex. It’s been a rough decade for us, is what I’m saying. During each of these faux-qualifying runs, where we failed to get far enough to even fail honourably, Canada played a total of eight games: two against minnows like Belize, Cuba, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and then six in whichever group we were fated to finish last in this time around.

I’ve put together a rough sample schedule of the games involved in either proposal (rounds we either didn’t or probably wouldn’t qualify for are in italics) on the left. Either of the new systems being slung around would see a big increase in Canada’s games played. Even if Canada failed to qualify for the final round in a three-round system, we would play a minimum of twelve games. And if there was a twelve-team final round then Canada could play an amazing twenty-four games in 2014 World Cup qualifying, presuming we have a FIFA ranking to escape the first round, we don’t lose to some Caribbean island country, and we don’t finish fourth in the group and play a two-leg qualifier against a CONMEBOL side.

My god, can you even imagine it?

Neither of these proposals is entirely sunshine and light. If CONCACAF goes to three group stages, Canada would have a pretty easy first round but by no means a gimme. On the left I list a potential schedule based on 2010 World Cup qualifying results, and a first round of Mexico, Canada, Puerto Rico, and Belize is by no means a sure thing. If the gods disfavour us and we wind up with something like Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Cuba, we could have a serious test on our hands before the competition has even gotten serious and wash out in only six games. The advantage is that every game would almost certainly matter and if you can cope with the thought of a year and half of utterly life-and-death fixtures you may find that encouraging.

A twelve-team final group would reduce the risk factor, beyond the obvious (and current) peril of losing a short series against an inferior or badly-drawn opponent. It would also involve Canada and eleven other nations in a marathon of a final round which would heavily reduce the chance of an underdog sneaking into the third or fourth spots. And Canada is an underdog. We rank behind the Mexicans and the Americans, of course, but we’re not likely to be the best of Honduras, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and El Salvador in a long, critical tournament. Even if we do nab fourth place that would send us to an elimination match against a CONMEBOL team which we would almost certainly lose (remember how ignoble Costa Rica looked in their attempt last year).

But it would be progress all the same. It’s been a long-term obsession for many of us that Canada needs more  matches. It’s an obsession that we share with many of the mid-table CONCACAF sides, as fans of the Jamaican or Trinidad and Tobagan national teams would happily regale you about at length. The recent spurt of friendlies with which the CSA has gifted the Canadian team is both helpful and welcome, but there is no replacement for a competitive game. And until we actually qualify for something there can be no match more competitive than World Cup qualifying. It is the yardstick by which casual fans measure us. Not even the 2000 Gold Cup title could stand as an achievement next to actually making the World Cup for the first time in a generation. As we are once again seeing around the country, the World Cup is when even casual soccer fans come out and pay attention, and merely seeing Canada in that schedule would lend some legitimacy to the entire national program.

If I had to pick, I’d prefer the large, twelve-team group. There’d be something viscerally delightful in seeing the lines of Mexico or Costa Rica playing at Commonwealth Stadium in February, of course. It’s the surest way for Canada to get as many games as possible, which is the point. And if we ever get our act together, if those wavering guys like Junior Hoilett and Teal Bunbury start to pick Canada rather than the alternative, and if the CSA continues to trend in the right direction, then we might just be the third best team in CONCACAF on merit by 2014. There are a lot of “if”s in that sentence, but the large group would give us our best shot at making our dreams into reality.

Either proposal, however, would be better than what CONCACAF has now, and I cannot hope more than I do that the powers that be pick one of them.

Edit: well-traveled Canadian soccer journalist Duane Rollins informs me via Twitter that the stutter-step Barbara took – where he hesitated rather than came to a complete stop – is still legal. The irony of criticising a referee for not knowing a rule when I may not have known the rule myself is not lost on me.

I’ve got a confession to make. I didn’t actually watch the first half of the match between the Whitecaps and the Carolina Railhawks. You see, the game was being played simultaneously with the third period of Philadelphia – Chicago, Stanley Cup finals, game six, and there is still enough hockey-lover in me that I wanted to see the Stanley Cup awarded (which eventually it was). When the first few Blackhawks had finished skating around with their prizes I flipped on the live feed of the Whitecaps game just in time to see the ball placed at centre for the start of the second half. And the two teams battled it out for forty-five minutes, and nobody scored, and the Whitecaps, who draw more than Bob Ross, picked up another single point for their growing collection.

There was some second-half excitement. Doudou Toure got in about five minutes of very exciting action before being substituted out after an unfortunate clash of heads. Marcus Haber did not score but finally began to look useful, which is a case of awkward timing given that this was the last home match in his loan stint as the Whitecaps now embark on the road for five (!) matches and Haber will return to West Bromwich Albion at the end of June. Martin Nash played a whale of a game defensively and probably left his feet more often in that half than I’ve seen him all season. It wasn’t bad, really, but not much went on.

Which is a pity because all the action was in the first half. Ansu Toure’s second goal of the season, for example, built off of a splendid passing play and tapped into the back of the goal, the sort of play that the overly-fancy Whitecaps have attempted all season and actually pulled off maybe once. Or Carolina’s goal, which is drizzled in a simply stunning amount of controversy. In stoppage time at the end of the first half, Zurab Tsiskaridze was rocked going up for a ball at centre and spent some time down in a heap without drawing a foul as the Railhawks attacked the other way. The ball was worked into the area by Etienne Barbara of Carolina, who had it out with Nelson Akwari in a running battle through the area. At length, Barbara went down and referee David Barrie pointed to the spot, as they say, without hesitation.

The fans thought that Tsiskaridze had been fouled. The fans thought that Barbara hadn’t. So imagine their hooting and derision as Barbara stepped up to take the spot kick, and imagine the derision that turned into disbelief and open horror as Barbara performed the infamous paradinha, the stutter-step penalty move that has been popularized by South American footballers but spread around the globe. It is sometimes effective but frequently considered unsporting and against the spirit of the game. But lots of things are unsporting and against the spirit of the game; what’s important is that the paradinha has also been illegal since May. It wasn’t exactly a headline-grabbing rule change but one hopes that, oh, I don’t know, a professional referee would have been aware of it.

Personally, watching the replays, I think that Tsiskaridze had the misfortune to be hurt on a fifty-fifty ball and wasn’t fouled (he returned to play in the second half and seemed no worse for wear), and that Akwari was grabbing Barbara enough that a penalty was a realistic, if a slightly soft, call. But the botched paradinha stuns me. The rulebook says that, if a player attempts the stutter-step, he should receive a yellow card and the kick should be retaken. Not exactly the end of the world. Etienne Barbara is a professional striker, one of the best players on quite a good Carolina team, and a Maltese international. If given the chance he probably could have converted a second penalty and he doesn’t play rough enough for a yellow to be a serious issue. This game probably winds up a 1-1 draw all the same.

But oh my god. David Barrie gets paid cash money to officiate soccer games and he doesn’t stay up-to-date on changes to the rules of soccer. Screaming about second division refereeing is an extremely popular pastime (and one in which I have indulged from time to time) and this is one of the reasons why. Too many of the referees seem less like professionals and more like enthusiastic amateurs – “oh, you want me to come ref a game Wednesday? Cool! I’ll hose off my cleats!” One can almost picture the referee and his assistants at half sharing orange slices like six-year-olds in a youth league, such is the amateurism. I will miss a great deal about the second division when Vancouver moves up to MLS – the stadium, the fans, the atmosphere, the exclusivity and snob value of cheering for a club most of the city doesn’t care about – but one thing I will not miss is the refereeing. Yes, the jump to Major League Soccer and, with it, major league officiating will doubtless ease many a worried mind…

…oh, crap.

Okay. So, while “does not know the rules” is a fairly major complaint, it turns out every soccer fan in the continent has something to hate about their referees. Actually, it’s more like every soccer fan in the world, and I can think of a few Irish fans who were shouting obscenities at their monitors every time I bitched about a referee not knowing what the rules are. Benito Archundia may be the worst referee in the world but he’s also good enough to serve at approximately one hundred million World Cups. Bad refereeing is a universal problem, it seems. One from which there is no escape.

Seriously, though. The paradinha has been illegal for three weeks. You’ll let me have my irrational bitterness on this one, won’t you? Pretty please?

It’s simple. It’s annoyingly “representative”: the mountains I can see, but the bits of the water are supposed to be waves? It looks like two Umbro logos tipped on their sides like Coke machines in a high school. The colours are weird, and it’s hard to imagine how it’ll look on an actual uniform. It is such a huge departure from anything the Whitecaps or 86ers have ever had that it forfeits twenty-four years of iconographic legacy.

I think it’s terrific. Look at that thing! The trend in North American soccer lately appears to be towards simple, unambitious logos: witness AC St. Louis, the Philadelphia Union, etc. I think this is the greatest trend of all time. If Real Salt Lake changed their name, MLS would actually look and sound classier than half the leagues in Europe.

In truth, I like it better than the current logo. I feared I’d be alone in this because it’s such a radical departure, but the reaction on the Southsiders forum is almost universally in favour and even the Twittersphere is approving. The old spit-curl-wave logo wasn’t particularly beloved among the fandom (the point of the shield was off-center! You have no idea how much that has fucked me up over the years!) and by disclaiming ambition and shoving-in-every-possible-symbol disease, this logo attains a certain timeless elegance.

If I could change one thing, I might scrub the ‘Vancouver’ and the ‘FC’. It’s the ‘FC’ I particularly dislike – we know you’re a football club, guys; no hockey team could pull off a logo like that. And you’d have to kill the ‘Vancouver’ in the name of balance. Just ‘WHITECAPS’ in big white letters. Yessss. Although that would run the risk of making it look like the icon for a construction company.

Speaking of construction companies, and on an entirely unrelated note, FC Edmonton unveiled their full slate of ticket prices today. The domestic friendly prices are unchanged from what I previously reported, and an end-zone seat at Commonwealth for the premiere international friendlies will set you back $25. Have you ever watched a soccer game from the end-zones at Commonwealth? I cannot physically describe to you how much I don’t recommend it. For a seat you can actually watch a soccer game from, you’re laying out $35. That’s a lot of pie.

They’re setting major-league prices for what is, so far, minor-league talent getting stomped into the FieldTurf by more illustrious adversaries. It would be nice to see Portsmouth or Colo-Colo, of course, if you were a soccer-starved Edmontonian. But if the fan pays $35 to see the famous team, watches the famous team win 6-0 over an overwhelmed FC Edmonton, and then is asked to shell out for season tickets the next year… that can’t be a good start, can it?

I don’t write about the World Cup much in this space, for a number of reasons. First off, this is a Canadian soccer blog and Canada’s not in the World Cup, so I’d kinda be abandoning my core competency as the corporate types put it. Second, what, am I going to add something to the discourse? It’s the World Cup! It’s not like when I blather on about FC Edmonton and I’m the only one talking about it. The Internet is currently 96% World Cup content by weight, so what am I going to add? Uh, that Messi’s pretty good, isn’t he? Please.

I did, however, have one World Cup-related tidbit I wanted to get off my chest. As anybody who is functionally literate knows by now, our deadly rivals in sports and in life the United States have been drawn in the same group as Mother England, parent state of the glorious empire that gave birth to our beautiful nation and home of the monarchy we still call
our own. Canadians have traditionally had an affinity for the English soccer team, partially because of our national history and partially because they’re essentially the Canadian team on a larger scale: like us, they’re lovable losers who face immense expectations which they never,
ever live up to. When they succeed, which they rarely do, it is more off of heart and grit than skill. And their entire soccer memory revolves around one moment in their distant past when they actually reached the promised land they have spent generations since aspiring to. Also, Owen Hargreaves isn’t on the team this year, which takes care of one problematic factor for the Canadian.

So, naturally, I’m cheering for the United States.

I was all excited about my American sympathies. The United States is another country where soccer barely registers on the national consciousness and yet their media is so tied into ours that when the American team does well, as it did in last year’s Confederations Cup, the surge in interest carries over the border. Even people asking “huh, the American national team is pretty good, why is ours so shit?” is more attention than the Canadian national team usually gets and if the sight of Sam’s Army cheering the Americans along motivates people to come out with the Voyageurs the next time Canada’s in town, then that’s brilliant. Of course we should cheer for the United States! If the Americans do well, it can be nothing but good for Canada, and besides they’re a likable team of hard-working, modest men (as well as Landon Donovan) given no chance by the inbred cadre of European-based soccer elitists.

It seemed like a terrific post until I noticed that, in true World Cup fashion, everybody else had already written it. The Canadian guys went in the tank for the United States back in
May. On the Voyageurs board, hotbed of both Canadian soccer support and old-school European-centric attitude, support for the Americans runs about fifty-fifty. Duane Rollins, who I may never have agreed with before, is undecided-leaning-United States. Even Ben Knight wants the Americans to go all 1776 on the English, and if Ben Knight is rooting against the English the rest of us should probably just give up.

How am I supposed to be a contrarian now?

This outpouring of (tepid, somewhat self-conscious) support for the United States is, as far as I can remember, unprecedented. I cheered for England in 2006, and so did many others. The horror of that penalty shootout with Portugal, in a tournament where England had for once played up to its reputation, is a moment that still resonates in my mind and I’m sure in that of many of my readers. In spite of my reverence for Paul Peschisolido, when I remember David Seaman it’s not for robbing Pesch blind in the FA Cup in 2003 but for the previous year and that other thing he did. My Canada-first-England-second cred is pretty solid, and I’m not alone, but the country is swinging the Americans’ way. There’s an awful lot of “I usually cheer for England, but this time…” out there.

It’s not like this is a particularly unlikable English team. All the media hype and the WAG factor and the focus on a few stars in the tabloid press… none of this is new. It seems to me that this is just more evidence of shifting priorities among fans of Canadian soccer. Whether it’s because of MLS and Canadian success there-in or simply increasing awareness of the fact that we play soccer too, Canadians are paying more and more attention to their own backyard. You’d be hard-pressed to say that soccer in general is more popular in Canada; registered players in Canada actually decreased by nearly 8% last year. But we’re looking more and more to our own professional ranks instead of across the pond: even the second division in Canada is getting more attention than it used to. It’s not so long ago that Swangard Stadium never sold out and the Montreal Impact were playing in front of 9,000 mostly empty seats at
Claude-Robillard.

And when you think of soccer in Canadian terms, cheering for the United States just makes sense. Are we finally getting past our collective fetish for “the old country” in Canada? I think it’s finally happening. Very slowly, but it’s happening all the same.

FC Edmonton will not play a league game for about ten months, and yet I’m already so far down on them I could probably finish their basement.

FC Edmonton’s roster came out last week, of course, and the only surprise is its mediocre nature. In addition to the previously-reported aging Eredivisie men, there is former Middlesbrough prospect Shaun Saiko, rejected by the English academies and returned to his home town. There are some uninteresting former members of the Vancouver Whitecaps academy, also Alberta natives. There are two Brazilians new to the North American professional ranks. 22-year-old Neto Miguel is a defender from São Paulo who moved to Canada at age 17, an engineering student at the University of Calgary, and a CIS player for two schools whose closest previous run to professional experience was four months training at Corinthians. 25-year-old Thiago Silva moved to Edmonton from Brasilia last year and is playing soccer at NAIT, a technical school not known for athletic achievement. To describe Miguel as “mediocre” would be to do him a favour and Silva is below even that level.

There are a few decent names. Saiko figures to be a decent second-division player and it’s good to see him back in soccer, and Sam Lam was quite a good CIS player with the excellent University of Alberta program who trialled in Seattle. Striker Kenny Sacramento is only 21 years old, saw some time training in Europe, and is a star indoor player with the Winnipeg Alliance of the CMISL. Kyle Yamada even played with Canada’s national soccer team! Well, our national beach soccer team. But none of them are men you can build a second-division team around and the lineup, filled out with players plucked out of AMSL rosters and bad CIS programs, would be an uninspiring USL PDL side. There are no players with extensive second-division experience even though there are some, such as former Aviators and Whitecaps midfielder Gordon Chin, who have Edmonton connections and are readily available.

This is intentional, believe me. FC Edmonton also announced their friendly schedule and what we see is a collection of USL PDL teams as well as the Montreal Impact (reportedly sending their academy rather than the first team) and, as a closer, Miami FC. Giving their organization credit, perhaps they know the level of players they have and are setting their sights accordingly. Certainly, this lineup is likely to be an affordable one, which is an admirable concession to the realities of professional soccer in Edmonton.

The only stunning thing about these friendlies is the price of a ticket: FC Edmonton will charge $25 for a reserved seat and $20 for general admission. This compares to a $26.50 seat at Swangard Stadium for the silver section – seats under cover and better than anything at Foote Field – and $20 for a reserved spot in the roughly-Foote-equivalent bronze section. The Victoria Highlanders, one of Edmonton’s friendly opponents, charge $17.25 for a non-premium seat.

The point is, a minimum of $80 in tickets to take the family of four out to a bad stadium and watch a team of metro league players play a friendly against semi-professionals with hardly a single name recognizable by even hardcore supporters is a big ask.

Of course, on the other hand stand the international friendlies. Portsmouth is the biggest name, hitting Commonwealth Stadium on July 21. But Chilean powerhouse Colo-Colo and Brazilian first division side Vitória are certainly far better opponents than a club of FC Edmonton’s calibre would seem to deserve. Portsmouth’s in a place financially where they might do anything for money. Even so, getting three teams of this calibre to travel such a distance can’t have been cheap for the FC Edmonton administration, and is if nothing else a sign that they’re willing to spend money to make money. Even casual soccer fans would show up to see Portsmouth, relegated or not, and while Colo-Colo and Vitória aren’t household names they’re at least respectable teams which will hopefully draw a crowd.

The Faths and Mel Kowalchuk have some experience with international friendlies: experience that isn’t universally positive but apparently hasn’t put them off. An Everton – River Plate friendly last year at Commonwealth Stadium was a bit of an attendance disappointment, bringing only 15,800 through the turnstiles at Commonwealth Stadium, but ticket prices were high and from a financial point of view the Fath brothers were sufficiently persuaded that they’re bankrolling FC Edmonton and these three international adventures.

So why am I worried? I’ve got a real emotional stake in FC Edmonton and would be gutted to see them fail, of course. And I see a lot of ingredients for a fall in this team as it’s consisted. Their website is enthusiastic but amateurish, running blog posts on the UEFA Champions League and fun but superficial podcasts. So soccer moms and casual fans – you know, the people who make soccer profitable in this country – go to a lousy stadium for soccer, pay USSF D2-level money to get in, and a team of amateurs and old men play obscure opposition, and if somehow the kids do get hooked news or decent on-line resources aren’t coming from the club so far. The international friendlies will be fun but they’re with opponents far superior to even an average Canadian second-division team. They are, essentially, gimmicks, and that may bring fans but it will also bring cynicism.

If FC Edmonton improves their media work, manages expectations, and bolsters the 2011 roster with the USSF D2 veterans that will let them beat Miami FC in their final game, they might get somewhere. If they could open the wallet and grab an old, familiar, respected name like Wes Charles or a can’t-be-long-for-Montreal Eduardo Sebrango (NOT RICK TITUS), even better. But this is a concerning start.