Canadian Women’s Soccer League – 2025

On Monday, December 5th, 2022, in an exclusive interview with CBC National’s Adrienne Arsenault, Diane Matheson and goal scoring Canadian Legend Christine Sinclair announced that they had been hard at work putting together the foundations for a professional Canadian Women’s Soccer League.

2025 Kick Off

According to Matheson and Sinclair, in CBC segment you can see here, the league is slated to kick off in 2025 with only the Vancouver Whitecaps FC and Calgary Foothills FC (long since established soccer programs) as confirmed participants. There are supposed to be 6 more teams joining the Canadian Women’s Soccer League but who those teams are is still unclear/undecided. (Read the full CBC.ca article here.)

We say ‘undecided’ because the Project8Sports website openly asks:

Want to bring professional women’s soccer to your hometown? It’s time. Let’s connect.

Project8.ca

Project8Sports appears to be the leadership group/corporation behind the proposed new Canadian Women’s Soccer League. The company is led by co-founders Diane Matheson & Thomas Gilbert and also lists Georgia Simmerling as Director of Global Partnerships.

Funding for a Canadian Women’s Soccer League

To date both CIBC and AirCanada have been listed as major sponsors/partners in the league, but no information has been put forth to the duration or valuation of their sponsorship. Hopefully it’s a lot.

The price tag for a team has been estimated between $8-10 million dollars, however, if the league is structured anything like the CPL then the fee isn’t actually an outright payment, but rather a commitment (backed up by financial disclosure) that an ownership group, can and will be able to afford investing that amount over a set number of years even IF operating at a net loss. (How FC Edmonton’s ownership slipped past this requirement is a whole other article of it’s own.) This is conjecture however as the actual details of ownership haven’t yet been released.

Potential Controversy

Project8Sports and this new Canadian Women’s Soccer League may have opened themselves up to criticism and controversy by engaging the Vancouver Whitecaps FC organization as a founding club. Over the past few years volumes of evidence have come forth that VWFC, while acting as custodians of the Canadian National Women’s youth teams were complicit in the sexual and emotional abuse of young women and the subsequent coverup of those abuses. While Bob Birarda has started serving his 16 month sentence for his primary part in the abuses at VWFC Canada REX program, there are still regularly calls for the rest of the VWFC board and ownership to also be held accountable for covering up Birarda’s abuses and thus allowing him to continue coaching young women for a further decade. Current members of FIFA who were members of Canada Soccer at the time have also been implicated, full details here.

One does, considering all of the above, have to question why Matheson and her partners at Project8Sports would allow the participation of an organization exposed for egregious abuses against female soccer players in a Canadian Women’s Soccer League? Like, why? Just for the money? One has to believe there were other, better and less tainted by abuse, organizations that could have been enticed.

Will Brampton/Peel Get a Team?

We can only hope so, but knowing how disparate, petty and competitive the youth soccer organizations are in Peel, one does wonder where the support will come from. BAS will support the league in whatever way we can. (In spite of VWFC’s involvement.)