As much as I have a soft spot for Canada’s 1986 World Cup soccer team, it’s worth noting that its comparison to the Canadian team that will go to Qatar this year, pandemic and wartime permitting, is really not much of a comparison at all.
The ’86 World Cup team was, indeed, the first to play in a World Cup for Canada. It qualified by winning a game it needed only to tie, just like the 2022 team on Sunday. The game was played on a day that was cold and windy, just like the day at BMO Field in Toronto, but without the snow.
That team, as special as it was, had a roster of small “p” professionals, some with nowhere to play. The North American Soccer League had just folded. A few found work internationally, some played part-time and some were players who might uncharitably be classified as “plumbers.” The team that’s going to Qatar is talented and deep, with so many good professional players that its most gifted goal scorer missed the last five games and watched on Sunday from Germany, amid tears of happiness, as his national teammates advanced without missing a beat. Alphonso Davies expects to recover from his myocarditis in time to play soon for Bayern Munich, and in Qatar for Canada.
And while it was impressive that Canada won the right to represent CONCACAF nations in the 1986 World Cup — only one team qualified from the region 36 years ago and only 16 qualified world-wide — Canada didn’t have to beat CONCACAF’s best to get there. Had the World Cup been played anywhere else, Mexico wouldn’t have had a free ticket as the host country, and Canada would surely have stayed home. After all, Mexico won two games and made it to the quarter-finals before losing on penalty kicks to West Germany, which lost in the final to Argentina.
The players from 1986, for the most part, came home to their jobs and to a Canadian Soccer League that, under-attended and underfunded, underpaid its players. That CSL lasted six seasons. The players from today’s also return to their jobs — in some cases as highly paid players — and to an adoring public. Coach John Herdman, unlike 1986 coach Tony Waiters, is likely to be swamped with job offers. Already, his team is the darling of World Cup 2022 after what is being heralded “a seminal moment” in Canadian sports, probably because it is.
This team is the real deal, rightly going to the big show because it is Canada’s best team ever. As somebody who witnessed first-hand what happened in ’86, I like to think that version of “Canada’s best team ever” laid some of the groundwork for this one, albeit 36 years later. And that the torch now passed will lead to Canada’s continuing presence as a soccer power until…well, who knows?
However, when the over-reactive TV announcers told us on Sunday that the Canadian team was “making history” it wasn’t. History was taking Canada to the World Cup for the first time, not the second, and that credit still belongs to the 1986 Canadian team.
And it always will.
