THE OTHER NATIONAL TEAM · CANADA
During the men’s World Cup, FemGol will trace the history of some of the women’s national teams from the countries taking to the pitch. Because a country’s football doesn’t fit in a single team.
This afternoon, at BMO Field in Toronto, Canada’s men’s national team will play Bosnia and Herzegovina in the opening match of a World Cup staged on home soil. It is a moment of real history: the third appearance in their existence, the first as hosts, in front of their own crowd. The cameras, the front pages and the conversation will belong to them for a few hours. Understandably so.
But in Canada, the phrase “the other national team” works the other way round from almost anywhere else.
Because while the men’s side went thirty-six years without setting foot in a World Cup — between Mexico 1986 and Qatar 2022 — the women’s team played in every World Cup from 1995 onwards, strung together three consecutive Olympic medals and claimed a gold. For decades, when Canadian football won anything, it was the women who won it.
The gold that arrived on penalties
The summit has a date: 6 August 2021, Tokyo. Canada beat Sweden in the penalty shoot-out of the Olympic final, completing the climb that had begun with bronze medals at London 2012 and Rio 2016. Along the way came the most symbolic victory imaginable: a 1-0 semi-final win over the United States, their neighbour and historic tormentor, settled by a Jessie Fleming penalty.
In that squad, as in every one before it for two decades, was Christine Sinclair. Her tally remains hard to take in: 190 international goals, more than any other footballer in the history of national teams, men included. She retired from international football in December 2023 without the World Cup she had chased all her career, but with something almost no legend achieves: she changed the place her sport occupies in her country.
Sinclair no longer plays. She is now a co-owner of Vancouver Rise, champions of Canada’s new professional league. Her career has ended; her influence has not.
The drone stain and the rebuild
It is not all epic. At the Paris 2024 Games, Canada’s coaching staff were caught using a drone to spy on New Zealand’s training sessions before the opening match. FIFA docked Canada six points in the group stage and handed one-year bans to head coach Bev Priestman and two members of her staff.
What happened next says a great deal about that dressing room: six points down, Canada won all three group games, qualified regardless and only fell in the quarter-finals to Germany, on penalties. An impossible title defence that ended up becoming a statement.
The rebuild has had a name since January 2025: Casey Stoney, the former England international who had managed Manchester United and San Diego Wave. Her brief is clear — renew an ageing squad — and the process has had the expected bumps, with defeats to Switzerland, the Netherlands and Japan in 2025 and signs of growth in 2026. The most recent came on Tuesday: a 6-0 away win over Costa Rica, with a hat-trick from Janine Sonis, an Olympic champion in Tokyo. Canada currently sit ninth in the FIFA rankings.
The league that was missing
If the Mexican chapter of this series revolved around a league born in 2017, the Canadian one revolves around a league born the day before yesterday. The Northern Super League, driven by former international Diana Matheson — scorer of the bronze-medal goal at London 2012 — kicked off in April 2025. It was the answer to an anomaly that had lasted far too long: the Olympic champions had no professional women’s league of their own, and every one of their footballers was forced to emigrate.
The NSL is now playing its second season, with six clubs from coast to coast — from Halifax to Vancouver — and an expanded calendar of 80 matches between April and November. Every game can be followed in Canada, spread across television and digital platforms including TSN, CBC, RDS, Radio-Canada and the league’s official YouTube channel. Vancouver Rise are the reigning champions; AFC Toronto won the inaugural regular season. Nobody expects it to compete with the NWSL or with Europe tomorrow. But its mere existence changes the question a Canadian girl asks herself: no longer whether she can turn professional, but where.
The exported talent, meanwhile, keeps setting records. In July 2025, Arsenal paid Liverpool one million pounds for Olivia Smith, a 20-year-old Canadian forward: the first seven-figure transfer in the history of women’s football. The record barely lasted a month — Mexico’s Lizbeth Ovalle surpassed it with her move to Orlando Pride — but the barrier had already fallen. A Canadian was the first footballer anyone paid a million pounds for.
Equal pay for equal play
There is another field in which Canada has ended up becoming a reference point, however rough the road. After years of labour conflict — including a brief stoppage before the 2023 SheBelieves Cup, called off under the threat of legal action from the federation — Canada Soccer and the associations of its two national teams ratified an agreement in March that runs until the end of 2027.
The deal establishes an equitable framework of compensation and benefits. Its most visible figure: the same base fee of 25,000 Canadian dollars per match for the group stage of the men’s World Cup in 2026 and of the women’s World Cup in 2027.
The men stepping out at BMO Field today receive the same per group-stage match as the women will receive next year. In Concacaf, that still counts as news.
November, the month that matters
Because that is the detail that puts everything in order: Canada have a World Cup of their own to play for. In late November they will contest the Concacaf W Championship in the United States, the tournament that hands out the direct tickets to Brazil 2027. The format is unforgiving: win your quarter-final and the place is yours; lose it and a play-off awaits. The United States, Mexico and the five other qualified teams will be there.
And the World Cup will not be the only thing at stake. The same tournament will also hand out Concacaf’s places for the Los Angeles 2028 Games. For a team whose summit came precisely at an Olympics, November will measure something more than a generational handover: it will say whether Canada keep the Olympic place they took years to conquer.
Canada arrive with unfinished business among the elite: eight World Cups played and a ceiling that remains the fourth place of 2003. At the most recent one, in 2023, they failed even to clear the group stage, their worst result since 2011. The golden generation is retiring in instalments; Olivia Smith’s generation is pushing from below. November will tell whether the handover has come in time.
This afternoon, Toronto will be a celebration and the whole country will be watching its men’s team. Fair enough: some thirty-six-year waits deserve to be celebrated without caveats.
But when the World Cup ends and the cameras switch off, the honours list of Canadian football will still say what it has said for years.
That in Canada, the team that knows what winning feels like has been the other one all along.
