Outputs and Outcomes

Canada's co-hosting a World Cup. The five problems it could have solved but will still be there.

Photo by Will H McMahan on Unsplash

In case you’ve been living under a rock, a World Cup kicked off last week. A once in a generation opportunity that can be leveraged for significant growth and opportunity but isn’t. But before we get to what Canada is failing to do with it, it is worth spending a moment on the context in which it is happening. Certainly not to dwell but because the backdrop matters greatly.

This tournament arrived with serious questions over FIFA’s relationship with the Trump administration already in circulation. Its president awarded a sitting head of state — the leader of one of three host nations — an inaugural peace prize that most observers understood to be designed specifically for that recipient. A national team is in constant negotiation about whether it can safely compete on US soil because of a shooting war involving the host nation’s military. Visa restrictions have and are continuing to impact fans and officials. The geopolitical noise around this event is deafening but not incidental. In many ways it is structural — a direct consequence of who FIFA is at this moment and who it chose to align with and the terms on which they made that choice.

Again, I say this not to relitigate it. Others are and will continue to cover the details and specifics and quite frankly are far better at it than I. But I do say this as someone who, like every football person I know, will be watching. In many instances so far, the football has been compelling. Matches have been played in extraordinary atmospheres and wonderful stories have already started to emerge. Ultimately, legends will be created and crowned. And throughout the event, in Mexico, USA, and Canada, stories depicting fans coming together at stadiums, in cafes and bars in every city across all sixteen host cities. Communities being pulled closer to the sport is what makes these tournaments special. That is what World Cups do and it is true of every one of them regardless of the circumstances surrounding it.

But that is not what I write about. And it is not my role.

My role — the thing I have spent twenty-five years building the standing to do — is to interrogate the structures. The governance. The decisions made in rooms before the cameras arrived. And on that level, separate entirely from the football, this World Cup represents something Canada will be reckoning with for a long time.

A lot of Canadians are angry about this World Cup. Not about the games or the players but about the costs. About the grift — perceived or real. About the sense that something enormous was done in their name, at their expense, and they will receive very little back. Most of that will fade into the background for the next ~30 days but it will resurface.

And that anger is and will be wholly legitimate. And to be honest, it’s more precisely aimed than most people even realize.

The problem isn’t that Canada is co-hosting a World Cup. I believed then, as I do now, that it was the right thing to do and be a significant part of. However, the problem I have is that Canada never decided what hosting a World Cup was supposed to accomplish. No serious answer was ever given to the most basic question a country’s citizenry has the right to ask: why is the public cost worth bearing, and what will we have to show for it when the cameras leave?

But what makes it all worse is that the system was designed to produce exactly this outcome.

FIFA didn’t accidentally drift away from the legacy model that defined World Cups past — the shift began in earnest with Australia and New Zealand in 2023. They removed it deliberately. The local or national organizing committee — the body that represented a host nation interests, that created accountability, that was the counterparty in the negotiation — was engineered completely out of existence. What replaced it is, for all intents and purposes, a franchise model. FIFA gets the revenue. Host cities get the invoice and nobody’s job is transformative thinking.

The timing compounds it. Host agreements are signed a decade in advance, while political will is high and national excitement makes scrutiny feel unpatriotic. By the time the invoices arrive and the questions get asked, any leverage is gone. The deal is done. The only thing left to negotiate is what celebrity will be at the opening ceremony.

The grift — again, perceived or real — was not a bug in this system. It leans closer to a feature.

Which makes the core question even more important — and even more damning for those who should have been asking it:

What problem(s) do we have — as a country, as a sport, as an organization — and how can hosting this event accelerate a solution?

That reframe shifts everything. The event no longer becomes merely an objective. The event becomes an instrument. A World Cup is not a reward for reaching a certain level of football development. It is a tool for getting there — if you decide to use it that way. Used well, it compresses decades of institutional progress into a few years of concentrated will and resource. Used poorly, it is an expensive, temporary spectacle that leaves the underlying problems exactly where it found them (or worse, exacerbates them) and hands a generation of citizens a bill they didn’t consent to.

The hosts who managed to build lasting legacies recognized this dynamic and strategized and constructed something real. Here are three simple examples…

USA 1994 — MLS was a condition of the bid. The price of admission. Thirty years later it’s the second-best attended league in the world.

Qatar 2022 — organized an entire nation’s development agenda around one question: what does this country need and how does the World Cup get us there faster?

Japan and Korea 2002 — seeded a football culture that had barely existed a generation before. Both are still building — and have embedded it so deep that they’ve qualified for every tournament since.

A host city organizes an event. A host nation uses one deliberately. Those are vastly different ambitions — and Canada entered that negotiation without fully recognizing that difference. There has been no one at the table whose job was to extract legacy commitments. And so none were extracted.

That is the structural explanation. It does not fully excuse what followed. Because even within a one-sided negotiation, ambition and institutional capacity can still move the needle.

If you cannot explain what problem you are solving, you should not be hosting the event.

That is not a policy critique, it is ultimately a moral one.

Off the top of my head — and some of these were entrenched in the original bid — Canada had five problems this World Cup could have solved. Real problems. Some with serious institutional design already behind them. They will all still be problems when the final whistle is blown in New Jersey.

No functioning football governance architecture. At present, there is no coherent ecosystem connecting the foundational stages of the game to the professional, to the national teams, or to international standing. This is not exclusively a Canada Soccer problem. It’s system problem. The complete absence of a governing philosophy that runs the full length of the chain.

No permanent football infrastructure. There is no base camp legacy. No facilities pipeline. No strategic deployment of physical assets to communities that will never otherwise see investment at this level. The opportunity was available. It was not taken.

No cultural transmission mechanism for football. There has never been an attempt to craft a national equivalent of Japan’s Football Starts at Home. No community-level program that makes the game feel native rather than imported. The World Cup will generate enormous public attention yet none of it was contemplated, yet alone converted into a participation architecture or a concept of culture change.

No institutional architecture for sport as a national tool. Despite grand declarations of funding being returned to where is should have been, there are zero mechanisms to deploy sport strategically — domestically for community transformation, internationally for diplomacy and positioning. I made a suggestion regarding a dual-Crown-Corporation model and outlined what was proposed and designed in detail. The political will to act never materialized, nor is there any indication it will.

No connection to global football solidarity structures. No clearinghouse connecting domestic development to international player flows, training compensation, and solidarity mechanisms. Canada remains a peripheral actor in global football’s economic architecture. That status was available to change. It wasn’t.

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I have been thinking about these five for a long time. I hold them with reasonable confidence — but also with genuine humility. I am one person with one vantage point, and the full accounting of what was possible and what was missed takes time to emerge.

So I want to ask directly: what problem am I not naming? What did Canada have going into 2026 that should be on this list — and is there any evidence, however partial, that it was addressed?

The essays that will follow examine each of the five in depth: the problem as it existed, what a serious host nation would have built, what we actually did, and what the failure cost us. Some of what I will argue was possible is still very much possible, even though most of the window has closed.

The anger Canadians are feeling is not misplaced at all. It just needs a more precise postal code. The grift — perceived or real — was structural. The ambition that could have redirected it toward something lasting, something worth the cost, has been absent.

This series is my attempt to name them all clearly.