One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Will Canada’s chaotic golden decade set the stage for an historic World Cup?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group B preview. You can also read previews of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Qatar, and Switzerland.
Will Canada’s chaotic golden decade set the stage for an historic World Cup?
What a strange decade it has been for Canadian soccer.
Mostly, it’s been good. The past 10 years have been marked by the emergence of a generation of Canadian men’s soccer talent heretofore unheard of: Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David, Tajon Buchanan, Alistair Johnston, Stephen Eustáquio and others have all attained a level of club soccer success that very few other Canadians have ever approached.
These players formed the core of a team that qualified for the nation’s first men’s World Cup in nearly four decades, notching historic wins against the United States and Mexico on the way to finishing in first place in Concacaf qualifying in 2022.
In that span Canada also made a run to the semifinals of the 2024 Copa America, far outperforming the other North American participants. Throw in an Olympic gold on the women’s side, and that’s a pretty strong 10 years of soccer.
But there’s also been plenty of stuff that has been weird or bad or both. In Qatar, Canada largely outplayed the competition for large stretches of the group stage, but only managed a single goal and lost every game. Meanwhile, a protracted pay dispute that led to the women’s team playing a 2023 tournament under protest and the men’s team refusing to pay a 2022 friendly dragged on for over four years and was only just resolved in March.
In 2023 John Herdman, the coach who engineered Canada’s return to the world stage on the men’s side, abruptly quit to take a job at Toronto FC, and within three years was coaching Indonesia. The following year was marred by not only the women’s Olympic team but also the men’s Copa America team being accused of cheating in separate (but possibly related?) drone spying scandals.
The team is currently coached by Jesse Marsch, who is undoubtedly doing a good job, but also can’t stop talking about how angry he is that he isn’t coaching the United States.
So where does this roller coaster golden period leave Canada heading into the 2026 World Cup?
Mostly in a pretty good position. In Davies and David, they are likely to have two of the best attackers on the pitch in most of their group games, plus Tani Oluwaseyi and Cyle Larin provide solid depth at striker. Ismaël Koné’s transition to Europe hasn’t gone as well as many hoped, but he is still one of the more promising young midfielders to come out of North America in a long time.
The team has plenty of talent, and for as much as he keeps saying weird things in interviews, Marsch’s frenetic pressing style is perfectly engineered for a player like Davies to get the ball isolated against defenders and to generate attacking moments.
And the bar for “best ever Canadian men’s World Cup” is, to be fair, quite low. Prior to 2022, their only appearance was a winless outing to Mexico in 1986. If they can give their fans something, anything, to celebrate, they will be etched in stone in Canadian soccer lore.
For all the ups and downs over the past 10 years, Canada have their strongest roster ever, and three home World Cup games to get the results to cap this era with a truly historic moment.
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