GOOOOAAAL is a series on the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Stay tuned for more dispatches from n+1 contributors on the beautiful game en América del Norte.
Downtown is not the most beautiful part of Toronto, but it’s certainly the most identifiable, a stretch of skyscrapers spanning the waterfront that you’re most likely to recognize from a postcard or as a cinematic ersatz Anycity, USA. Along the route to Toronto Stadium (formerly BMO Field), the crossing guards at some intersections have taken to wearing FIFA referee uniforms. Schooled in Canada’s national Just For LaughsGags–style comedy, the refs hand out penalty cards for slight misdemeanors—a group of tourists laughing at their costumes get a yellow card, as does a car entering the crosswalk. Behind them, on the northeast corner of the intersection, is a Toronto Streets to Homes Assessment and Referral Centre where gathered outside, on most days, is a stooped crowd of people, some using, others occasionally wandering into oncoming traffic. Passing by, I think about one of the referee–crossing guards handing them red cards.
In the years since the US, Mexico, and Canada were selected to host the World Cup in June 2018, the relationship between Canada and our southern neighbor has taken an unprecedented turn, at least since the early 19th century. Trump has reneged on the USMCA trade agreement, first signed to replace NAFTA just months after the announcement of the “United Bid”; he instituted, and then revoked, tariffs on Canadian goods; and threatened to annex Canada as “the fifty-first state” and referred to Prime Minister Mark Carney as “the future Governor.” Last year, Carney shocked long-favored conservatives with a minority victory, rallying votes behind the promise of “standing up to Trump.” A paraphrase from roughhousing NHL star Gordie Howe—“Elbows Up!”—became the rallying call for Canadian sovereignty, and cafes started selling Canadianos in place of Americanos. At Davos this year, Carney urged middle powers like Canada to chart their own course, “to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and the territorial integrity of the various states.”
These purported values have not manifested in policy. Carney, the former-banker-turned-Prime Minister, has announced plans to cut forty thousand jobs in the federal public service, to slash funding for our public broadcaster by $192 million, and to defund Environment and Climate Change Canada by an additional $1.3 billion, austerity measures that rival the ’90s, all while increasing the budget for defense. Moreover, Carney has maintained Israel’s “right to defend itself,” supported America’s strikes on Iran (“with regret,” he said), yielded to Trump’s demands for increased military spending by non-American NATO members, and followed his orders to tighten our borders.
The city, we were initially told, would be upended by the World Cup: Traffic, already worse, per some reports, than in Los Angeles, New York and Mexico City, was expected to become 15 percent more congested; Airbnbs, overstuffed and overbooked, would fetch a grand a night; the parks and shoreline would be overrun by football-crazed tourists. While the city did spend an estimated $300 million on hosting the spectacle, $3,000 ticket prices and astronomical travel costs left hundreds of seats empty at Canada’s opening match with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and hotel bookings were so uneven that the Destination Toronto CEO predicted they might be “lower than [what] a typical June would be,” whereas traffic has actually slightly improved. The expected financial boosts from the World Cup—which cost taxpayers an estimated $1.1 billion—have been so disappointing for Canada that the Federal Minister of Sport has tasked a team of researchers to find better ways to measure the economic impact of sports. Save for a robust Bosnian parade and bars plastering the FIFA logo on their windows, the tournament has been relatively easy to ignore. Like the foreign-owned condos sitting empty downtown, Toronto Stadium appears notably less than packed on television. Torontonians can rest easier knowing our worst fears weren’t realized, though not for a lack of trying.
“This summer, don’t give your money to the executives, politicians, oligarchs, and dictators that steal soccer and sell it back to you for their profit,” my friend Louis Sanger, a poet and translator writes in the introduction to Soccer Poems, an anti–World Cup zine for which he has recruited poets from Canada, the US and Mexico. “Soccer is free with a coffee or beer at your neighborhood cafe, cantina, or sports bar. It is also free online at websites like: footybite, tarjetaroja, tvpass, and papashdclub.” Though he refuses to give FIFA any money, Louis still loves the tournament, and keeps a reproduction of the Cup along with a homemade bracket on a Bristol board at his apartment. We watch Canada’s first game against Bosnia and Herzegovina at Rosa Branca, a sports bar on College Street that was once a hangout spot for Portuguese septuagenarians to play rummy and is now filled with twentysomethings in Adidas Sambas and Italy soccer jerseys. They often give out Rosa Branca–branded hats for free, but only to regulars. It took me a year of asking to finally get one. When a waiter finally pulled the hat for me from behind the bar, he gave me a hug and shook my boyfriend’s hand, as though we had just bought our first home.
Prior to this game, Canada had lost each one of the six World Cup matches the team had played. Where Canada dropped to 120th in the 2017 FIFA World rankings, the intervening years have seen the team experience an unprecedented surge, climbing to 26th this past year after qualifying for its second ever World Cup in 2022. At the helm of this new era is manager Jesse Marsch, an American with Emmanuel Macron’s silvery swagger and Ted Lasso’s earnest liberalism. Marsch, a serious contender to coach the American National team in 2023, was passed over at the last minute, a decision rumored to have devastated him. And so, like a disgruntled diplomat, he expatriated to Canada, where he saw a chance to coach an emerging team to a historic tournament. While his Princeton soccer career quite literally landed him the honorific of “All-American,” he has taken to the Canadian identity more stridently than most natives. He travelled across the country: “I need to know what being Canadian means.” He liked what he saw: “I’ve found a place that embodies for me the ideals and morals of what not just football and a team is, but what life is.”
As the game against Bosnia and Herzegovina begins, Marsch proudly stands to sing “O Canada.” The first twenty minutes are slow, but then, through a slack defense, Cyle Larin kicks a clean shot into net. The crowd erupts; it is Canada’s very first World Cup Goal. Though Bosnia ties the game not long after, Marsch has led Canada to its inaugural non-loss at the tournament. Even without a victory, the postgame media appearances are cheery: Marsch dedicates this record-breaking moment to the crowd. As the throng at Rosa Branca swells, the bar’s regulars recede to a windowless backroom to seek refuge from the hordes of hipsters flirting and drinking and play cards in peace. I venture to the rummy table to ask one of them about how overrun the place has become. He says, faithfully, and likely hoping that I will go away, to come back in four years when Italy is in the Cup again.
For the first time, FIFA has instituted “hydration breaks,” one mandatory three-minute pause in each half of the game for players to grab water. Conveniently, these breaks also introduce time for six standard-length television commercials, advertisements from which FIFA will extract an estimated $250 million profit in the US alone. In Ontario, one of the ads most frequently played is sponsored by the province’s conservative government, led by Doug Ford, party premier and elder brother of Toronto’s late, crack-smoking mayor, Rob. “Protect Ontario,” the words fade in. “A safer Ontario means playgrounds with no drug injection sites nearby,” an anonymous voice hums over images of the province, which are either AI generated or shot by someone with a similarly robotic and uncanny sensibility. The ad prompts viewers to visit ontario.ca/saferontario, where one can read more about the Ford government’s efforts to build more jails, clear homeless encampments, and remove injection sites near parks and schools (Ford has in fact cut all provincial funding for safe injection sites, indiscriminate of location). The province has in turn, used such budget cuts to spend an unprecedented $19.5 million on the commercials. At the Toronto FIFA Fan Festival™, the crowd boos when they come on.
Nowhere is the tension between what a World Cup could be in Toronto, and what it is, more evident than at the Fan Fest™, the public watch party FIFA facilitates in all host cities, where you can see the game but also check out their corporate sponsors. Toronto’s iteration, hosted at the Fort York Historic Site, a museum and public park where Canadian and British forces banded against the invading Americans in the War of 1812, is next on my list of free World Cup venues, though you can also buy access to corporate sponsored zones that range from about $120–$360. On the day I go, the free tickets are sold out—thankfully, I have a press pass—and it’s busy, but certainly not packed. An emcee speaking to a crowd of hundreds of adults sitting crisscross-applesauce in front of him encourages everyone to move up, so the field looks less sparse on the video feed. (To be fair, I am at a group stage Iran–Mexico game, but reports that the Fan Fest™ has stopped broadcasting every World Cup game suggests that attendance is not what was expected to be.) It is also National Indigenous People’s Day, and so a land acknowledgement is made; I cannot think of anything more Canadian than a land acknowledgement at a former military base turned into a FIFA Fan Fest™.
Throughout the Fan Fest™ grounds, FIFA’s corporate sponsors have different “activations”—essentially photo booths, where you can take pictures with branded garb, play a mini game, and leave with a memento. At the Hyundai activation, you can answer trivia questions on both FIFA history and Hyundai EV models, and then scream as loud as you can in a sound proofed booth to see how many decibels you reach; your scores for both are then printed on a personalized car freshener with your face on it. The Dove Fresh Clubhouse offers a series of photo ops after which you can take a misty refreshing shower and treat yourself to a stick of deodorant; Home Depot presents “David Beckham’s Backyard,” which does not look like what you might imagine David Beckham’s backyard would look like, or any backyard really, but you can get your face painted in Home Depot–swatched colors (one imagines a child sweatily choosing between eggshell and ecru).
Hypnotized by the promise of saving $9 on deodorant, I try to skip the cameras and head straight for the loot—“No,” an attendant tells me, “You need to have the entire clubhouse experience.” The spectacle makes me think of the coronation of Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra at the Khodynka Field, where impoverished masses were drawn by promises of celebratory bread rolls and sausages, before rumors of low supplies of beer and pretzels resulted in a fatal stampede.
Even more uncanny than the corporate sponsors is the simulacrum of brand booths at the “Ontario Campus” farther afield. Various provincial entities have set up booths that are meant to mimic the excitement of the corporate activations, though lacking in the same grandeur and, for what appears to be legal reasons, with restrictions around take-home swag. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Commission (OLG), has set up a foosball game where, if you score, you can take a stub to redeem for a prize at an OLG booth that is not legally allowed to sell lottery tickets, though they are plastered across the facade. The Ontario Power Generation: Super Power the Passion booth has a backdrop where you can “step into the electricity” and take a photograph against their rendition of the city skyline. (Ford, with support from Carney, has proposed that the OPG build two of the world’s largest nuclear power plants costing an estimated $221–294 billion, over double the cost of investing in renewable energy supply.) The best booth by far at the Ontario Campus is Humber Polytechnic’s “Soccerbots,” where students have programmed remote control robots to play soccer against each other, an uplifting accomplishment by our nation’s youth, until you remember that the public college’s government funding was cut so substantially that they started offering voluntary exit packages to staff. “I wish them all the best,” Ford commented on the matter.
After the Fan Fest™, I am no longer confused by reports of empty stadium seats or less-than-packed watch parties, but rather impressed that FIFA has been able to draw out the crowds that they have for events where you’re squeezed for every dollar, herded into sun-soaked fields, and taunted by brand engagement representatives as though you’re some sort of alcoholic child. Not to mention that actually watching the sport is a dreadfully boring endeavor. I grew up, in true Canadian fashion, playing hockey, and so to watch soccer and try to comprehend that the players are running thirty-something kilometers per hour is to sit on planet Earth and blindly trust that we too are spinning across the universe at ungodly speeds.
But Adam Gopnik, my fellow countryman who started out writing about the 1998 World Cup in Paris with the same conviction that hockey is “the greatest of all games,” concluded that perhaps all that scoring, all that action, is a bit gauche, and really “nil-nil is the score of life.” Likewise Louis, a true zealot, is insistent that I am unrefined in my wish for higher scoring games. He suggests I try playing Candy Crush instead. He says that a zero-all game can be beautiful, pointing to the Cape Verde game against Spain on June 15, which ended scoreless; a small country with a population of half a million had managed to hold out against one of the most established European teams. “Soccer creates a mythology we’re lacking in literature or art or actual mythology,” Louis says. “It gives us these rare shared spaces, of going to a stadium or watching a game. For a writer of poetry, that’s the feeling they’re trying to generate, is this sharedness.”
I try to assimilate this feeling of sharedness to my own experience watching the Cup, but the shared space that immediately comes to mind is the World Cup Watch Party hosted by Casamigos Tequila, where I watched Saudi Arabia versus Uruguay at the bar RendezViews (“Views” being a reference to either the CN Tower which looms over the back patio, or, more likely, the 2016 Drake album). Their patio is a Tiffany-blue playpen where you can watch the game, kick a ball around in futsal courts, and buy anything from margaritas to kale caesar salads to disposable vapes. The crowd is quite tame. One couple, Fernando and Laura, who immigrated from Mexico City about twenty years ago, tell me about how much more fun the World Cup was when their hometown hosted it in 1986. Laura was 15 then, and there were parties everywhere and people dancing in the streets. The couple considered getting tickets for a game in Toronto but found them unreasonably expensive, as was going back to Mexico City for games, where their remaining family was priced out too. So, like me, they settled for RendezViews. “I came here looking for a party,” Laura says. “Where’s the party?” She’s right; each picnic bench appears to be its own island, though it’s probably the least hostile civic space to be found in the surrounding architecture, most imposing of which is The Well, a development down the street which is somehow both a condo and a mall, built on the lot that used to house the Globe and Mail, Canada’s preeminent newspaper. “People are too afraid to talk to each other here,” Laura’s daughter says.
Looking to improvethe ambience for the next match, I meet up with Louis again. He is joined by Ricardo Sternberg, an acclaimed Brazilian poet who emigrated to Toronto in 1979, where he teaches Portuguese and Brazilian literature at the university. Ricardo, Louis believes, was once described as Canada’s preeminent love poet, but we can’t find where that was written, and so I am prepared to take on the descriptor as my own. Ricardo was a close friend of Louis’s father, the poet Richard Sanger, who passed away almost four years ago, and they still meet up to watch soccer together. I find Louis and Ricardo at a family-owned sports bar in Little Portugal to catch Scotland–Brazil. This has been their go-to since the bar where they used to watch soccer, Caffe Brasiliano, closed a decade ago, a hideous Southern Californian–Italian fusion restaurant opening in its place. We’re close to the Ossington Strip, where the fate for all watering holes of this kind is either demolition or gentrification, like Rosa Branca. Louis and Ricardo, therefore, have given me explicit instructions not to print the name of their bar.
I ask Ricardo when he started liking soccer, and he doesn’t have an answer, except to say that there was never a time where he didn’t. “I dream of soccer,” Ricardo tells me as the staff ply us with lupini beans and Portuguese-branded water bottles. “I used to wake my wife up kicking in the middle of the night. She’d get mad at me, but I’d ask her, ‘Do you know how hard it is to play soccer uphill?’” He’s not sure what draws poets to the sport, but he tells me about a pickup game he played some decades ago, with Louis’ father and other Toronto poets and journalists in the park at Fort York, pre–colonization by Fan Fest™. It provides me solace to think they once graced the field.
Ricardo’s dreams notwithstanding, I ultimately found myself zoning out as Brazil took a dominant lead. Watching Canada–Qatar the week before, however, I was gifted with the perfect game for a hockey fan: Canada won by an unusual margin of 6–0, and a lot of the goals were hockey-ish, Louis explained—crowded around the net instead of clean, soccer-like shots from the midfield. Forward Jonathan David’s shot was saved, but the Qatari goalie was unable to grab the ball; Cyle Larin, suddenly close by, nailed the rebound for Canada’s second goal. David had a hat trick in a career high for a team who just a week prior had never even scored a goal in the World Cup. But most touching was when Ismaël Koné, a midfielder who was born in Côte d’Ivoire and raised in Montreal, was tripped by a Qatari player. Koné’s shin snapped and he collapsed, his teammates surrounding him to shield his injury from the crowd. David cried as Koné was wheeled off on a stretcher, bravely waving to an adoring crowd. When Nathan Saliba, who replaced Koné, scored the fourth goal for Canada, he held up Koné’s jersey in tribute.
At the end of the game, the players took a knee to celebrate the historic victory. Marsch’s bombastic sideline dances have since become a meme (though one of his players has said that Marsch is “more Canadian than we are” he is still, undeniably, All-American). “When I came here the vision was more than just this World Cup,” Marsch declared in a postgame press conference. “It was to change the sport in the country . . . and to create an identity for what Canadian soccer could be.” Marsch, who speaks of the “special character” of his team, credits a large part of soccer’s revival to immigration. Canada’s soccer system has historically favored a pay-to-play model fashioned in the image of hockey, a sport with prohibitively expensive equipment and league fees. Competitive soccer leagues can cost up to $4,000 to register, and that price doubles with tournament travel. Now though, the faces of the team, Cyle Larin, Jonathan David, and Alphonso Davies, are all first- and second-generation immigrants, suggesting that we’re finally moving toward the more democratic European scout system of spotting nascent talent and making them stars. Marsch boasts one of our most diverse national teams, though notoriously white hockey being the national game means there isn’t much competition for that title. “They say that the US is a melting pot and Canada is a mosaic,” he opines. For a moment, I’m ready to buy whatever it is they’re selling back to us.
But for all the talk about how immigration has saved soccer, Carney has slashed Canada’s 2026 immigration targets, cutting new permanent residents by about 21 percent, temporary foreign workers by 37 percent, and international student arrivals by 60 percent. And anyway, isn’t the only reason Canada won is because Qatar was such a weak team, allowed entry in the World Cup as part of FIFA’s forty-eight team expansion, a money grab that the Ghana coach has said makes the competition “vulgar and ordinary”? “For Canada, this is a big moment in our history,” Marsch says. “No Canadian will forget this day.” It feels more like a wish than a statement of fact.
Canada loses its final group stage game against Switzerland. On June 28, they match up with South Africa, another weaker squad, in the Round of 32. Both teams are defensively inclined, with Canada playing an especially panicky offence. It’s 0–0 when, with minutes left in stoppage time, Stephen Eustáquio—born to Portuguese parents in Leamington, Ontario—scores. It’s something of an underwhelming victory—the Vegas odds, prominently displayed on tournament broadcasts, were -380 on Canada winning—but still, Canada has done it, they’ve won a knockout game, and will go on to play a serious team. Marsch is overheard telling players that they are Canadian heroes.
The last World Cup game played in Toronto (Portugal–Croatia) is held on July 2—the Toronto stadium, built for lower-turnout Major League Soccer, is the smallest of all host cities, and presumably insufficient for more competitive games where a sellout is all but assured. USMCA meanwhile, is up for renewal just a day prior on July 1, also Canada Day, but Trump is unwilling to sign.
For Canada’s Round of 16 game against Morocco two days later, I am at my boyfriend’s family cottage in Alice Munro country, rural Ontario. They’ve only recently installed WiFi and it doesn’t totally work, so we have a plan to hotspot the game, if service permits. It’s a sunny day, which bodes well for signal strength but poorly for the idea of watching a likely Canada loss, huddled around a laptop, wasting precious time that could be spent swimming. At 3 PM, we finally get the stream to load—the data, against all odds, appears to be working—and we are greeted with surprising news, which is that the game is over, and Morocco has already won 3–0. In all our efforts to jerry-rig a sports broadcast off the river, no one had thought to check that the game actually began at noon.
Instead, we get the highlights: Alphonso Davies had aggravated a hamstring issue, and though an MRI was clean, Marsch says “it wasn’t worth risking it.” This infuriated fans, who have speculated that after Canadian doctors misdiagnosed Davies’s ACL tear years ago, his Bayern Munich team has forbidden him from playing and sustaining seemingly minor injury. Across TikTok and Reddit, fans accuse Davies, who was born in a Ghanaian refugee camp after his parents fled the Libyan Civil War, of not being a real Canadian and not deserving to play on the team.
“We were better,” Marsch maintains of Canada’s performance against Morocco in his postgame interview. The question now, he asks, is “Can we build the depth of what we’re doing with the team?” “Can we build a real Canadian DNA into the kind of football we want to play?”
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.