The Contender
Canadian men can do better at the world’s most popular sport—soccer, aka football, aka the “Beautiful Game”—says one passionate fan.
July 08th, 2026
“[Twenty-six years ago,] Canada was trailing 2 to 1 when Carlo Corazzin tied the score on a stunning bicycle kick, a spectacular, acrobatic play when a player leaps horizontally with his back to the ground and boots the ball overhead.”
Review by Tom Hawthorn
Murray Mollard brought a flag to cheer on Canada in a soccer match against Costa Rica, whose exuberant fans made their allegiance known through songs, chants and music.
Looking around the football stadium in San Diego on that day 26 years ago, Mollard struggled to spot fellow Canadians. Most of those sitting around him were supporters of Mexico, whose national team was to play in the second match of the day.
Canada was trailing 2 to 1 when Carlo Corazzin tied the score on a stunning bicycle kick, a spectacular, acrobatic play when a player leaps horizontally with his back to the ground and boots the ball overhead.
Mollard celebrated in his seat. A nearby Mexican fan scolded him: “C’mon, man, get up, show your flag!”
Chastened, Mollard half-heartedly ran around the concourse with his flag, feeling self-conscious with every step.
Building unabashed pride in Canada’s national men’s soccer team is one of the remedies Mollard offers in Winning Pitch: The Canadian Men’s Soccer Team at the World Cup and Beyond by Murray Mollard (Harbour $26.95), a call to action to turn Canada into a worthy contender on the world stage alongside the ranks of true soccer nations.
The book arrives simultaneously with the biggest sporting event of the year, the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup. The tournament, which boasts a massive global audience, is being co-hosted this year by Mexico, the United States and Canada. Seven matches are scheduled for BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, where Canada will play Qatar and Switzerland after opening against Bosnia and Hercegovina in Toronto.
Alphonso Davies,
age 15, Canadian
Soccer Association
tournament, 2016.
The European soccer media has Canada ranked in the low 30s in this expanded, 48-team tournament. This year’s Canadian team is expected to advance out of the four-team group stage with such rising talents as midfielder Tajon Buchanan, forward Jonathan David and defender Alphonso Davies, though the latter as of this writing was recovering from a strained right hamstring suffered during a match for his club side, Bayern Munich. Four years ago in Qatar, Davies scored Canada’s first ever goal in a World Cup.
While Canada’s national women’s team has
long been a force in international play, thanks in part to the gritty genius of Burnaby’s Christine Sinclair, the story on the men’s side is more about indifference, missed opportunity, bureaucratic incompetence and a perennial lack of funding.
It is a history that has “mostly been shrouded in failure,” the author writes.
Winning Pitch is a passionate fan’s heartfelt—and sometimes heartbroken—history, memoir and manifesto for building a soccer culture across an icy land long beholden to hockey as a rescue from long winters.
Mollard has been obsessed with the sport since he was a boy in Calgary. By age 17, he had played the sport in five countries, including Brazil, and he was a teammate of future national team defender Randy Samuel, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago before growing up in suburban Richmond. Mollard won two national championships playing for the University of British Columbia’s varsity side on his way to earning a commerce degree. He has also been a youth coach and a director the sport’s provincial governing body, during which he actively sought to create more space for girls and women as players, coaches and administrators.
Tajon Buchanan playing for Canada
at the World Cup in Qatar, 2022.
Mollard convincingly blazes a pathway for Canada to rightfully take its place among soccer nations: better funding; top coaching with international recruitment until peers are developed nationally; clear development pathways for athletes; suitable soccer stadiums with professional teams from coast to coast; and building an ardent fan base. While the men’s team is cheered on by a traveling group of fans known as the Voyageurs, their size and passion are drowned out by the maniacal, musical, chanting, fireworks-throwing armies of other nations.
And much of that would happen if only the national men’s team could build on success on the pitch.
“We must break the cycle of our perennial existential crisis of recycling failure after every success,” the author writes.
A highlight of Winning Pitch is a retelling of the improbable story of Canada’s first appearance at the World Cup in 1986. The team qualified for the tournament by defeating Honduras 2-1 on a blustery, bone-chilling day on the pitch of King George V Park in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Earlier, they had won 1-0 in Honduras before a stadium of 50,000 crazed fans. (Honduras, remember, once engaged in a so-called Soccer War with neighbouring El Salvador following riots during a World Cup qualifying match.) Two of Canada’s three goals were scored by George Pakos of Victoria, an amateur player in his 30s who, when not making Canadian soccer history, worked as a water meter reader. Such weekend warriors are not expected to share a pitch with the likes of France’s Michel Platini.
As for that game where Mollard was embarrassed to show his passion to a crowd of strangers? The underdog Canadians went on to advance to the knockout round (after winning a coin toss—of all things—to break a tie in the standings of the group round) before embarking on an unlikely winning streak to emerge as Gold Cup champions of CONCACAF, which is FIFA’s governing body for North America, Central America and the Caribbean. That victory 26 years ago is the most recent tournament victory for the men’s team.
Jonathan David, Salzburg, 2021.
Here’s hoping Mollard and other Voyageurs do not have to wait so long for the next one. 9781998526598
Tom Hawthorn’s most recent book, Play Ball!, is an anecdotal history of baseball in Vancouver.
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