The FIFA Men's World Cup was very fun for Toronto, if expensive
We should host more international footy matches, at a smaller scale.
I love football. I’m not particularly good at it—or any athletics, really—but whether it’s clubs or national sides, regardless of the genders of the players, and regardless of the prestige of the tournament or league, I just love watching 90 minutes of footy. After Canada won gold at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics for Women’s Football, I was hooked on the game, and my first kit was for Canada’s national side, had Christine Sinclair’s name on the back, and was proudly emblazoned with the number 12. I eagerly flew to Vancouver in December 2023 so that I could watch her retirement match for Canada’s national side at BC Place, literally renamed Christine Sinclair Place for the night to honour Burnaby’s hometown star.
I travelled for dozens of hours by train to get from Toronto to New York City two summers ago, so that I could watch Canada play Argentina in the semifinals of the 2024 Copa América, where we were invited by CONMEBOL to participate and ran so deep that our men’s team faced up against Messi himself. While we lost, watching that match at MetLife Stadium, and cheering with our small Voyageurs supporter section, was an absolutely electric experience I will treasure for the rest of my life.
Mind you, I have also felt burned by Canada Soccer in the past, after the revelation that cheating through the use of drones to spy on opponents had been a prevalent tactic inside the organization, affecting not only the adult level but the youth teams. I took a short break from watching Canada’s national teams and Toronto FC, as they were the implicated organizations, but I never lost my love for the game, and watching the people of Toronto come alive these past few weeks as we hosted our six matches for the FIFA Men’s World Cup, I’m heartened to see more people fall in love with the game in the same way I did.
Let us address the criticisms of both Toronto’s involvement in the tournament bid, and FIFA itself, because there are many. There were significant cost overruns that the previous Mayor of Toronto, John Tory, forced his successor Olivia Chow to take the financial hit for. Only Toronto and Vancouver participated as Canadian host cities in the united North American bid with the United States and México, as other cities found FIFA’s financial requirements and policy demands to be far too burdensome. Data indicates that Toronto will not see much financial gain, if any, from hosting these six matches.
And as for FIFA, while it does fulfill the technically necessary purpose of coordinating international football, it is also a hilariously corrupt organization that gave Trump the “FIFA Peace Prize”, to the mass ridicule of the world, and appears to have revoked a red card against a United States player in this current tournament due to Trump making a personal phone call to demand it! At the same time, the United States refused to let the Iranians stay in the country for their matches, while FIFA refused to put their matches in México instead. There’s a lot of dirty stuff going on with how the United States is taking up their share of the hosting duties, and with how FIFA operates as an organization.
With all that said, to say it was a “mistake” for Toronto to host these six matches for the Men’s World Cup would itself be a mistake. Yes, by all accounts, it was not a profitable endeavour, and Toronto will not make money from holding the event. But I am a socialist, and I do not judge the inherent worth of something by how much “profit” it generates. I would rather look at what hosting this did for our city on a holistic basis, and when I do look from this perspective, I’m very proud of what we accomplished.
Firstly, Toronto pursued the RapidTO project of transit priority lanes for street-running trams primarily because fears over congestion during the FIFA Men’s World Cup created the pressure to increase the capacity and speed of public transit. The fact that we will have lasting infrastructure changes that improve the way our city works is itself a massive boon, even if it is not counted as “profit”, and it likely would not have happened without the pressure forcing the issue. Our transit system largely worked as necessary to serve the demand for these six matches.
From a wider perspective, I frequently hear criticisms about our atomized capitalist society for lacking “third places”, locations outside your workplace or your home where you can congregate with other people and socialize without the expectation of having to spend money to be there. On this basis, if there was any benefit to hosting during this tournament, it is that we spawned a proliferation of third places, not just at official city-designated locations, but across the entirety of the city.
Whether you’re a Torontonian or were just here to visit for the tournament, you had something to share with the people around you. Streets downtown were literally taken over with veritable hordes of supporters for the national sides playing matches down at BMO Field, braving through dangerous heat warnings. The coach for the Portuguese men’s team spoke of how much he loved the BMO Field pitch, and how disappointed he was that we wouldn’t be hosting any more games after Portugal played Croatia here for a Round of 32 match.
I agree with this man’s assessment of BMO Field, a stadium I enjoy returning to time and time again, and while Canada likely won’t be hosting another FIFA tournament for a fair bit of time—either by ourselves or jointly with another country—we certainly have the capacity to host smaller tournaments for CONCACAF, like the Gold Cup for national sides and the Champions Cup for clubs, tournaments held for both men’s and women’s teams.
The love of football has awakened in the people of Toronto in a way it previously had not before, and it fills me with joy. We should not let this tournament be the end of our ambition to host international football matches, and we should not be satisfied with just the occasional friendly. The people of our city are hungry for more footy, and they deserve satisfaction.