SoccerImpact announcement big news for Canadian soccer

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The Montreal Impact was officially unveiled as the next Major League Soccer franchise on Friday.

The worst kept secret in Canadian soccer was confirmed. In 2012 when Montreal begins play in MLS, Canadian fans will have three solid organizations to support: Toronto FC, the Vancouver Whitecaps (who begin play in 2011), and the Montreal Impact.

But what does it mean for the development of the game in Canada?

Most importantly, the addition of Montreal as an expansion team provides more opportunities for players to play professional soccer on Canadian soil. 

Until the arrival of Toronto FC in 2007, aspiring Canadians who wished to pursue a career in the game had to venture overseas, or risk taking up an international player slot on an MLS team in the United States. 

In 2012, when both Vancouver and Montreal will be in play, there will be three times the domestic opportunities for players than there are right now, which should increase the player pool for the Canadian national team.

I say should, because it is debatable whether there are enough talented Canadian players right now to fill one MLS team, let alone three.

Toronto-based football journalist Duane Rollins raised an excellent point in a recent blog. Montreal will be the third Canadian team to pick over the local talent, and they will surely have a more difficult time unearthing a hidden gem than both Toronto and Vancouver.

Tremendous opportunity

That being said, a third professional soccer team in the country provides Canadian soccer with a tremendous opportunity.

At the moment, elite youth player development is the responsibility of the provincial and national governing bodies. Canada is virtually alone in bearing that burden, because in almost every other soccer-playing country around the world, the professional clubs handle player development. 

It is those professional clubs who nurture talent from a young age so that those players can become assets as professional players.

By extension, the respective national teams in those countries benefit because more professional players are developed on a revolving basis. More players equal more competition for places, and more competition equals a better national team.

Since I returned to Canada two years ago, I have been advocating reform to our player development system. We simply do not produce enough elite players to be competitive in international football. Centralized high-performance training centres exclude far too many players who live in outlying areas, thus reducing our pool of players. 

If the governing bodies are unwilling or unable to regionalize those training centres because of the cost involved, then perhaps there is an opportunity to put in place a system that is organized by the professional clubs. 

Doing so makes sense because the ability to uncover talented players is paramount to the sustained success of the three professional clubs. They need to find and develop talented youngsters who will one day stock their professional teams.

Knock-on effect

Those youngsters won't necessarily reside within an hour's drive of a centralized training centre, so the need to cast a wider net is clear.

This could have a knock-on effect for the Canadian national team, depending on how you view the increased number of Canadian players in MLS. 

On one hand, it is unlikely that many of those players will immediately have the quality necessary to be competitive at the international level. Talented players will not magically appear simply because there are more teams. We need to develop those talented players, which will not happen overnight.

On the other hand, more MLS jobs for Canadian players would mean that less of our fringe national team players would have to go overseas to play for poor teams in obscure leagues -- or worse, for reserve teams at more established clubs.

It is no secret that many of our national team players do not compete regularly for their club teams. Without regular first-team competition, players stagnate and lose the edge necessary for success at the international level.

With three teams in Major League Soccer in 2012, those players not getting games in Europe could potentially find steady playing time in MLS.

And that has to be seen as a positive, not just for the three professional clubs competing in MLS, but also for Canadian soccer as a whole. Regardless of whether you are a fan of Toronto FC, the Vancouver Whitecaps, the Montreal Impact or none of the above, Friday's announcement is about as good as news can get. 

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