You would never gamble your household economy on the extraordinary expense and risky return that Vancouver will in playing footsie for footie with FIFA.
The surprising semi-final showing this month of the Canadian men’s soccer team at the COPA America tournament, and the consistent excellence of the women’s team, suggest even greater things are ahead in the sport for our country.
We will see evidence of this in two years, when the World Cup comes to town for seven games. Vancouver will be one of 16 sites for a tournament spread across the U.S., Mexico and the Toronto and Vancouver Canadian markets. Rather than pour worthwhile money into an infrastructure for a sport, we are paying premium prices for the spectacle of performances.
The mayor of Vancouver, Ken Sim, predicts the publicity and impact will be like “30 to 40 Super Bowls” at once and a “no-brainer.” I respect Sim as a good acquaintance, but I question his comparison of us as one of 16 markets for the tournament to being one of one sites as the nexus of the NFL’s championship game. We’ll be on worldwide TV for two hours, seven of 104 times, squeezed in wall-to-wall for the viewing audience.
We will see the city armed by all sorts of security forces , riven with Town Cars, strangled by street closures, choked by booked restaurants, for weeks before, during and after. We will spend our money on entertaining people we will likely not see again.
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