Mark Your Player, Exploit the Space: Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Canadian Multiculturalism through a Historicization of Soccer and the Men’s National Team (1970s–2000s)

The storying of the Canadian men’s national soccer team has established immigration, multiculturalism, and transnationalism as a linchpin of the team’s climb from relative obscurity. This was transparent in the framing of the team leading up to and during the team’s historic appearance at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, following a 36 year-long campaign to return to the tournament. The contemporary phenomenon of celebrating ‘outsiders,’ particularly Black men, through the national team prompts the question: What has been soccer’s role in the narrative arc of Canadian multiculturalism? A widely mediated rhetoric that transmits curated information (propaganda about a nation here, for instance) raises questions as to whom it benefits. Canadian soccer notably channels a paradoxical process wherein the Other’s hypervisibility is framed as integral to Canadianness. Celebrated Black players on the national soccer squad emerge as ‘aliens’—in an ‘alien sport.’ This mechanism underscores the centrality of Whiteness at the turn of the twenty-first century that delineates multiculturalism through race. Using the team’s qualification for the 2022 Qatar World Cup as fulcrum, the aim is to explore the history of multicultural soccer’s significance in national identity (de/re)construction leading up to that moment. To unpack this, I present a historical investigation of soccer’s intersection with race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and nationalism in Canada. This is done through an overview of the rhetoric around soccer multiculturalism from the late 1970s to the early 2000s through the Toronto Globe and Mail.