Good afternoon, and thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for the invitation to speak to you today.
My name is Victor Montagliani. I've had the privilege of being involved in soccer—or football, as I call it—in this country and internationally for over 30 years. I began as a player and later served in various roles as a volunteer for the game, beginning as a grassroots coach and in other positions in the province of British Columbia. I was eventually elected to the volunteer position of president of the Canadian Soccer Association in 2012.
Given what I have observed and experienced in the evolution of the game over the past 30 years, I want to briefly provide the committee with my perspective on the development and heritage of football in Canada.
For as long as I've been involved, football in this country has fought an uphill battle. As a sport that has long roots among immigrant communities in our country—like the one I grew up in, in east Vancouver—the domestic game has faced challenges in attracting meaningful support from this country's media and corporate establishment. It is not about participation or enthusiasm. We know we are the biggest participation sport in Canada.
During my five years as volunteer president of Canada Soccer—from 2012 to 2017—the lack of interest and support from media corporations meant that Canada Soccer had to spend its own money for our women's and men's national teams to be shown on networks such as TSN, Rogers and CBC, rather than allocating that to the grassroots. To be clear, these expenditures, over a decade, allowed our fans to catch 95% of Christine Sinclair's goals and 100% of Dwayne De Rosario's goals, which would not otherwise have been the case.
However, it is important to know where we stood in 2011 and early 2012. We had no sovereignty and no equity in our own game. We had absolutely no domestic media market. We had very little professionalization and zero industry for football in Canada. We had zero relevancy in the international arena, especially in FIFA and Concacaf. We needed to shift our mindset and shift it fast.
Since then, we've become founding partners of the NWSL with U.S. Soccer and the Mexican federation, subsidizing the salaries of our women's national team players so they could prepare for the 2015 women's World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
We hosted the women's World Cup in 2015—still, to this day, the greatest women's World Cup in history. We embarked on bidding for the 2026 men's World Cup, which we successfully won in 2018. We created an environment in which investors could come in and start the Canadian Premier League, which has also now set the groundwork for what we hope will be further investors for our Canadian women's professional league.
Of course, this has all been underpinned by the fantastic players in our country—our women's team and our men's team, which have won bronze, bronze, gold and, obviously, the qualification for Qatar in 2022.
Of course, Canadian corporations are private entities and can make choices as they wish, but it was obvious, when I was president of Canada Soccer, that we needed to take a different route and seek out new commercial partners—not only to encourage investment but also to encourage ambition. That meant looking beyond the usual suspects to find new, more dynamic partners with an appetite and a willingness to build domestic football for the long term.
The arrival of the new streaming platforms has provided great news for unlocking commercial opportunities that will help the game in Canada, as well as for Concacaf and FIFA, when the next rights cycles come up. Not only are these platforms shaking up the market; they are also enabling us to make long-term investments in the areas that have held the game back in Canada, namely infrastructure.
The discussions between Canada Soccer and what became Canadian Soccer Business were focused on providing long-term benefits for the growth of the game. No one would ever claim that every decision made or action taken was perfect. However, we must recognize the sacrifice and courage of the Canada Soccer family of volunteers, coaches and, ultimately, fantastic players. This has allowed both the men's and women's programs to break through the tier one ceiling of global football in the last decade.
We have the women's World Cup around the corner and, now, the men qualifying for the Concacaf Nations League for the first time in our history. Canada's future in this sport is very bright.
With that context, I look forward to discussing football with this committee.
Thank you.