Tickets To The Big Game

So Canada is bidding for the 2026 world cup. That's the sort of thing that will be greeted with laughter both in and outside Canada.

I've always thought that it's not that crazy an idea. Most CFL stadiums could be expanded with end-zone seats, giving us plenty of venues without too much expense.  The missing element is a giant, 80,000-or-so seat stadium for the final.  But Toronto will need a stadium that big if it is ever going to host the Olympics or an NFL team, so it doesn't have to be a white elephant.

We have another thing going for us: pragmatism. For the last little while, the big sports events have been given out with the apparent belief that anything can be fixed by the vortex of money that follows major sports around. And for a while that seemed true. The 2004 Summer Olympics was given to debt-ravaged sentimental choice Athens. That didn't blow up until years after the games. The 2008 Summer Games and 2010 World Cup were given to Beijing and South Africa respectively, in spite of human rights violations and a high crime rate respectively.

Those worked out, but now the flight of fantasy is catching up to us. Giving this year's Winter Olympics to a southern city in a corrupt pseudo-dictatorship is looking like a bad idea. FIFA must already be regretting giving Russia the 2018 World Cup. That is, if they have any spare time while regretting giving the cup after that to Qatar, without considering the whole "desert" thing. You could forgiven them for the looming disaster of the 2014 World Cup to Brazil - who would have believed that Brazilians have priorities higher than soccer?

So I figure that both FIFA and the IOC would be looking for someplace a little more reliable this time around, even if that means less exotic.  So we might have a chance. But having said that, it's still a crazy idea for the Canadian Soccer Association to spend any energy on this.

While I appreciate that hosting the World Cup would grow the game here, the fact is you need some basic level of support before you can deign to host the world championship of something. I figure the base requirement should be this: we only bid to host the World Cup when we we’re confident that Canada can play Italy in Toronto and the crowd will cheer for the home team. Right now we're nowhere near that.