What happens when your legacy is permanently tainted.
Canada Soccer has mortified the nation, and the stench will linger for years.
When the reigning gold medal champions from the Tokyo 2021 Olympics flew to Paris this month, they were not prepared to defend their title in quite this fashion. Assuredly, they presumed they’d be fighting their main battle on the pitch in front of legions of spectators; instead, they are desperately protesting that their previous title was not the result of blatant cheating, despite every evidence to the contrary.
Everyone with even a slight interest in association football, and additional scores of Canadians who have no interest other than national pride, are now all too familiar with the Canada Soccer cheating scandal. As TSN has reported, cheating through spying and drone footage is so prolific at Canada Soccer that it has infested not just the Canada MNT and Canada WNT/XNT (hereafter referred to as the XNT), but in addition has even pervaded the youth game.
According to Rick Westhead’s reporting at TSN, coaching staff for the Canada XNT cheated before a qualifying match with Panama in 2022 for the Women’s World Cup in Australia. Staff for the Canada XNT also spied upon their Japanese opponents at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, literally cheating against the host country itself to win their once-admired gold medals.
For the Canada MNT, Rick Westhead has reported that in 2021, the men’s players were shown spy footage from a closed practice for the Honduras MNT. They were shown the footage directly by Head Coach John Herdman, who was head coach of the Canada XNT from 2011 to 2018, then head coach for the Canada MNT from 2018 to 2023, and is now currently head coach of Toronto FC. ESPN reports additionally that at the Copa America this year, where the Canada MNT had unexpected success, the team had conducted cheating activities.
If you’re a current supporter for Toronto FC, that probably doesn’t fill you with much confidence. But it gets worse! Even the youth teams are implicated, with Rick Westhead writing in the same piece above that the women’s national Under-16 team cheated in 2016 during the CONCACAF Women’s Under-17 Championship in Grenada, where they won third place and qualified to that year’s FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup.
From the head coach all the way down to hired contractors, staff are widely implicated across both the Canada MNT and Canada XNT, as well as the youth levels. Furthermore, we have confirmed reporting that players themselves on the Canada MNT were actively aware. The only thing that has not been currently proven is whether any Canada XNT players were aware of the cheating in the same way that Canada MNT players were openly aware.
Goaltender Stephanie Labbé, who played in Tokyo 2021 for the Canada XNT during the high-stakes penalty kicks to decide several matches, took to Twitter in quick fashion after the cheating allegations became public, protesting her innocence publicly:
if anyone wants to speak about pks. i studied HARD the night before every match. Watched video of players taking pks in national team and club games. Made my own educated guesses based on that info. NO DRONE FOOTAGE was watched. Do not confuse great goalkeeping with cheating. [sic]
I believe that Labbé is telling the truth when she says she did not watch any drone footage. The problem is that TSN did not report that the spying in Tokyo was accomplished with a drone; spying has been occurring for many years with Canada Soccer, before the wide commercial availability of drones to the public.
For Christine Sinclair’s part, her statement was worded in very specific fashion. In her own words:
“I want to be clear that having been a national team player for 23 years, we were never shown or discussed drone footage in team or individual meetings I've been present for."
Never shown or discussed drone footage…but specifically only in meetings she was present for. And no comment on any of the reported instances by TSN where spying occurred without a drone. Most strikingly, no comment on whether she knew about any spying, merely that she was never present at that time.
I’m not going to write anything here accusing Christine Sinclair or any other specific player of any misconduct, not without hard evidence and corroborated reporting from journalists confirming specific named players had knowledge or participated in any fashion. Nonetheless, the two statements above do concern me, because based on the reporting from TSN, those statements can both be factually true and at the same time have loopholes large enough to drive a truck through.
The important thing is that even if every single player on the Canada XNT was blissfully unaware, even if they were never told about it by a single coach or assistant or any player they were friends with on the Canada MNT, it doesn’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things.
Their coaches designed and built a strategy around information they obtained from flagrant cheating. Players, knowingly or unknowingly, won their matches based on the advantage that their coaches provided them from cheating. A team is a team is a team, and the team wins together and loses together. When a player gets a red card in a match, it hurts their entire team, but that’s considered the natural consequences of breaking the rules of the game, and nobody is protesting to get rid of red cards.
And yet both Canada Soccer and the Canada Olympics Committee seemed intent on avoiding every possible consequence for such flagrant rule violation. After having been literally arrested by French authorities for illegal operation of a drone in the restricted airspace above the Olympic venues, not merely breaking FIFA rules but outright breaking the law of their host country, Canada Soccer had the sheer audacity to say they shouldn’t be docked any points for the matches they cheated to win.
Let’s be perfectly clear: Canada Soccer cheated against New Zealand using drone footage at the Paris 2024 Olympics, and then had the unmitigated gall to claim that they should still win points for a match they have literally admitted to breaking both the rules and the law to cheat in.
Whether they cheated against their French hosts is an open question, but clearly one that FIFA decided was likely enough to be possible, as they docked six points rather than three, ensuring Canada would gain no credit for winning either the New Zealand nor France matchups in the group stage.
One of the most striking quotes comes from this CBC piece, before the Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected Canada Soccer’s appeal. Kadeisha Buchanan, defender for both the Canada XNT as well as Chelsea in the top flight of English club football, said the following to media:
"Anything other than six points being deducted would be very helpful in this situation," said Canadian defender Kadeisha Buchanan. "Five would make me smile, four would be even greater, three would be wonderful."
Buchanan is an extremely talented player, who has accomplished a great deal and inspired scores of women around the world. But when FIFA is evaluating your entire national federation for ludicrously prolific cheating, and deciding whether your punishment is too punitive, this is the worst possible quote to give media.
Complaining that the consequences of your team’s cheating will make it harder for your team to succeed fills me with absolutely zero sympathy. The entire fucking point is to make it harder for you to succeed! Your entire team prolifically cheated for years, and literally cheated in this specific competition you’re being penalized in!
Commentators will bemoan that “everyone does this, and it’s only Canada that got caught,” and I would politely inform those commentators that I don’t give a shit! By definition, you can only fairly punish someone for something you have proof they did. FIFA should punish teams when cheating is proven, and they should punish it severely enough that the threat of consequences makes cheating too risky to even warrant an attempt.
Supporters for Lance Armstrong used the same excuse, that he was cheating for his medals but everyone else was cheating the same way so it’s unfair to punish him. And yet Lance Armstrong has been stripped of all his medals, and the judgement of the International Cycling Union was that if there truly was such a cloud of suspicion over that era, they would vacate the medals entirely and award them to none of the competitors.
In the case of the Paris 2024 Olympics, despite the protestations of Canada Soccer and the Canada XNT players, and the rejection of their appeal attempt, they managed to win all three of their matches, overcoming the supposedly “disproportionate” punishment to advance to the quarter-finals. I have been told that I should be proud for their success, and I’m not sure what I have to be proud of.
I don’t think we should have been docked points at Paris 2024; I think the Canada XNT should have been disqualified and sent home early. Docking the points ensured there were still games to play and sell tickets for and broadcast on television for revenue, so I understand why the Olympics and FIFA gave consideration to their greed rather than the harshest possible enforcement of competitive integrity.
But how could I possibly celebrate our success in a competition we literally cheated in? The points were penalized because FIFA knows that players have benefited from the tainted strategy of their coaches, knowingly or unknowingly. I have zero idea how much of our success against New Zealand was due to genuine hard work, and how much of our strategy was informed by the drone footage.
The Canada XNT awakened my love for football with their gold medal run at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics; the first kit I ever bought was Christine Sinclair’s Canada XNT kit, and it’s the kit I’ve worn to every Canada Soccer match I’ve attended. I wore that kit when I flew to Vancouver in December of 2023 and watched from the supporter section as Sinclair played her farewell match to a packed BC Place.
I wore that kit when I backpacked on the train to New York this July, to watch the Canada MNT play Messi and Argentina in the Copa America semi-finals. I’ve worn that kit so many times over the years that I’ve lost count; the Canada XNT are the reason I care about football, and that kit made me feel proud of our team and our country for what we achieved.
I haven’t worn that kit since the news broke in Paris. Every memory I have watching football at home, or in person, feels tainted and bitter now. The Tokyo 2021 Champions that drew me in built their success on a regime of prolific cheating, and after reading all the reporting by TSN and the CBC, I’ve realized that there has never been a single moment as a fan where I can definitively say that any of Canada’s national teams won their success through purely legitimate means.
I feel like a complete and utter fool for buying into our success, for spending countless amounts of money on tickets and travel and merchandise, because I thought we were a country legitimately improving at this sport. I don’t know what I know now, and I don’t know that I want to watch much of the Canada MNT, or the Canada XNT, or Toronto FC, or any team involving these tainted coaches.
I love football, and I was excited to watch our champions defend their gold medals in Paris. I was excited to go see Toronto FC play the second leg of their semi-final against Forge FC in the Canadian Championship.
But now? I don’t care if the Canada XNT wins another gold medal. I don’t care if Toronto FC wins the Canadian Championship and gets their CONCACAF berth. They can win, they can lose, I genuinely do not care.
I won’t be watching. Not for a while.