The first Canadian women’s professional soccer league will kick off on April 16, with the Vancouver Rise FC facing the Calgary Wild FC.
The Northern Super League (NSL) will feature six teams from Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. Its regular season is 25 games followed by playoffs and a national championship in the fall.
With the neighbouring province, Nova Scotia, now having teams in each of the Canadian soccer professional leagues, the question arises: Where does Soccer New Brunswick stand?
The Soccer NB website states its vision is to “enable the development and growth of the port of soccer in New Brunswick” and that soccer has “seen a growth of over 500 per cent in New Brunswick” in the last decade.
Manager of Development of Soccer NB, Natalie Fleming, said that the structure in New Brunswick has done a “good job” in terms of having equal programming for boys and girls, but the challenge relies on keeping the players past the teenage years.
“Now there are a lot more girls that are staying in the game, which means that clubs are able to have more teams.”
“I think there’s a lot more room to grow in terms of the retention past those teenage years. But I think, in general, the clubs in New Brunswick are doing a really good job in starting to get girls initiated into soccer,” said Fleming.
In New Brunswick, soccer players have the opportunity to participate in summer leagues and then in the tryouts for Team New Brunswick up to U-18 in October.
Team New Brunswick participates in competitions until the next spring; from those teams, the “top” players are invited to the New Brunswick High-Performance Academy.
“[I’m] happy to see that now most clubs, certainly the bigger capacity clubs, can offer programming to their members in the winter as well,” said Fleming. “Now girls that want to play soccer year-round can do it, which wasn’t the case not that long ago.”
Still, New Brunswick seems far from having a team in the NSL.
North American soccer as a market
Soccer in North America works differently from the rest of the world.
In the professional soccer leagues across Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, soccer is seen as a market where investors can buy franchises and join the major leagues compared to European or South American leagues where a team has to climb up the ladder from amateur leagues to the first division.
Even in Mexico, where soccer culture is bigger than the other two North American countries, there are no downgrades from the first division. Meaning that the only way to join the top-tier league is by buying a franchise.
The same concept applies to the NSL.
St. Thomas University women’s soccer head coach, David Itoafa, said that it would take a big investor to make a team in the New Brunswick market.
“I think it would be definitely a small market for a team in that league, for sure … but you look at the UNB hockey games and how many people go to the games, I’m sure the city could get around it and it would be amazing for the women’s game in general,” said Itoafa.
The creation of the NSL would still be a “boost” of opportunities for young and university players across Canada, as it provides a clearer path towards professional soccer.
“They don’t have to go to the States to work their way up, they can do that right here at home, which is fantastic, really exciting that they have something that motivates them,” said Itoafa.
University of New Brunswick women’s soccer head coach Jonathan Crossland agrees with Itoafa that the NSL allows student-athletes to make a living out of soccer “at some level” and do it in their home country.
Three players from the UNB women’s soccer team were invited to a camp with the Halifax Tides FC.
One of the invitees, fullback Aurora Hughes-Goyette, said this was a great opportunity to get to know the team’s goal with the league, meet players and coaches as well as get good feedback from them.
“Growing up, I never really saw the path to play professionally, so within the last couple of years, hearing about it and seeing it actually follow through to fruition is really exciting and uplifting,” said Hughes-Goyette.
