Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Stang
Promotion and relegation won't ever happen. And I'm OK with that. There are loads of reasons why - financial, cultural, geographical, etc.
Maybe in 30 years I'll be proven wrong if we have viable professional 2nd and 3rd tiers. But we barely have a stable first tier (with all due respect to the CPL - they're moving in the right direction, as is our pyramid in general), and I can't really imagine an scenario where there would be enough professional clubs below to make it possible.
Not trying to be a downer. I'd love a healthy top tier of 10-12 teams, and a great amateur and semi-pro feeder system to get players to the CPL and beyond. Canada just doesn't have the population or the culture for multiple tiers of professional soccer. Maybe it will one day, but we're decades away from that.
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Couldn't agree more. We have maybe 6 stable CPL clubs right now and an emerging amateur market who aren't able to handle more than a summer league of amateur soccer with bus travel. Nothing in between outside of a couple of clubs who talk big but don't back it up with investment (Electric City and TSS Rovers as examples).
In addition to this, when expansion does happen, the ownership groups are paying expansion fees. This comes with an expectation of level of play. Unless you remove that expansion fee, pro/rel won't happen. The people owning the clubs won't accept it.
The professional game in Canada is copy/pasting the professional game in the US. And that's fine. Because 5 years ago there barely was a professional game in Canada.