Duane Rollins
is a Toronto based journalist at The 24th Minute and The Score
Rollins: The giant missing piece in the Canadian soccer puzzle
The Montreal Impact make their first moves as a MLS side today when they select the best 10 castoffs made available to them in the MLS expansion draft. This is exciting stuff in the Canadian soccer community where the idea of three fully professional clubs operating in a stable league was all kinds of absurd less than a decade ago.
There is little need to go over all of the reasons why having the Impact join Toronto FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps is a positive thing. It’s self-intuitive that three pro teams gives the country a better chance to compete than no pro teams did. It’s not nearly enough, of course, but Canada is hardly alone in the soccer world in the amount of “big” clubs it operates with.
The difference, of course, is that those other countries have an endless amount of smaller clubs that act as filters pushing the best young talent into those big clubs. Canada, on the other hand, has, well, um…
