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Canada Soccer coach challenges Vancouver to bring out bigger crowds than Toronto

Adam Laskaris
Adam Laskaris
|
Jun 12 2025, 4:46 pm
Canada Soccer coach challenges Vancouver to bring out bigger crowds than Toronto
Canada Soccer/Martin Bazyl

The Canadian men’s soccer team might be the best they’ve ever been right now.

But are enough people coming out to cheer them on?

That’s the question popping around in the brain of head coach Jesse Marsch, the man tasked with leading them to next year’s 2026 FIFA World Cup.

This past week in Toronto, Marsch’s men played a two-match tournament in Toronto dubbed the Canadian Shield, a creative way to rebrand friendlies against international opponents.

A combined 38,364 fans attended the two Canadian matches at BMO Field, averaging just under 20,000 per game. It’s about the crowd size that would attend a sold-out NHL game, but in a stadium that holds 35,000 and is expanding to 45,000 for the World Cup, the gaps in many sections are quite pronounced in person and on television broadcasts.

“I thought the crowd on Saturday was good, but I was hoping for bigger… I think everybody’s learning about how to continue to market our sport,” Marsch told reporters in Toronto this week.”

With 13 matches coming to Canada next year for the FIFA World Cup — and at least three Canadian matches on home soil — Marsch expects the 2026 crowds to be much larger than those in 2025.

“I think the entire vibe around the World Cup will be very different,” Marsch said. “I do think this team deserves the Canadian community’s attention, right? I think they’re showing that it’s a good team. There’s a lot of good players here. There’s a lot of entertaining players.”

On Tuesday, the team will be playing in Vancouver at BC Place, taking on Honduras in their lone group stage match of the Gold Cup on home soil.

Tickets start at $55. The upper bowl is not currently open, with Ticketmaster showing hundreds and hundreds of unsold seats left in the lower bowl, particularly behind both nets.

“Going to Vancouver for a meaningful match against Honduras… I really want to challenge that community to come out and support this team and be behind the movement in every way,” Marsch said. “I’m hopeful that in Vancouver we can sell that stadium out, get close to selling that stadium out. Come on, come out and support the team. That would be what I would say to the community there.”

The Canadian national team has played in Vancouver just twice over the last six years, hosting a CONCACAF Nations League qualifying match in 2019 against French Guiana and a Nations League match in 2022 against Curacao. Neither match topped 18,000 fans.

However, Vancouver has demonstrated its mettle as a soccer city before, drawing upwards of 54,000 fans against Mexico in a World Cup qualifying match in 2016.

The 2022 window was also supposed to include a friendly that was eventually cancelled against two different opponents — first Iran after political pressure, and then Panama after a players’ strike due to ongoing arguments with the Canada Soccer board about player treatment.

In any case, only time will tell if Marsch gets his wish, and if the team will soon be selling out their World Cup matches with ease.

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