Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
I'd be pretty surprised if that happened. Many hardcore soccer fans have loyalties that lie with other countries, and Canada isn't good enough at soccer to really capture the imagination of the average Canadian sports fan. It would be a big deal, but I'm not sure that it would really reach that next level of event as you are suggesting.
Now if Canada went on some crazy winning streak then yes, it could take off as the team kept rolling along... or if maybe there was a big game on a Sunday afternoon the way the 2010 Olympic men's hockey gold medal game was scheduled, then maybe. But I'd be pretty surprised if cities shut down to watch Canada vs. Ghana at noon on a Tuesday or whatever.
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I was thinking this exact same thing. A lot of people I know have a deeply entrenched fandom thing going on with often powerful national soccer teams of other countries - more often than not it's due to ethnic origin (even after 4-5 generations in Canada, often not speaking much of the old language) but in some cases it's not ethnic but due to another affiliation. It would probably be pretty hard for Team Canada (Soccer) to break into that tradition and achieve the same level of fandom across the population in general, across all groups. (Which it does for hockey BTW.)
In other countries that have a shallow soccer culture like Canada but who have been more successful than us at the WC (USA, Australia), fans like these haven't generally jumped
en masse on the bandwagon for the national team of the country they're living in, and the old country's team generally remains first in their hearts and minds.
And the WC has enough teams in it (and the USA and Oz haven't gotten that far in the tourney) that they haven't generally had to make a tough choice between cheering for their country of residence/citizenship against the old country if they play each other.