Professional women’s soccer in Canada: Inside the new Northern Super League, and how it aims to propel the country to women’s World Cup glory

With Christine Sinclair in one ownership group and Stephanie Labbe a GM, the NSL doesn’t lack star power

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  Opportunity finally beckons

  In many ways, it’s remarkable that Canada has a women’s national team that has never been ranked lower than 13th, and not been that low since 2010, despite never having had a form of professional women’s soccer in a domestic sense. It’s an absence which has bothered, and challenged, the nation’s best players for many years, forcing them to move abroad upon graduating high school and making them unable to return home as long as they want to remain in pro women’s soccer, be that during their playing days or post-retirement.

  “You never had the opportunity to build something in Canada,” Matheson tells INDIVISA. “As Canadian Olympians and Canadian athletes, there's a good baseline here to build brand equity and a life and all these things, and we just never got the chance to do that while we were competing. That's one of the things we want to change.”

  Instead, Canadian players would be allocated in the NWSL, the top-flight of U.S. women’s soccer, as was also the case with Mexican players. But, just as the Mexican Football Federation (FMF) decided to stop that agreement with the NWSL and launch its own league back in 2016, the incredibly successful and constantly growing Liga MX Femenil, Canada is now getting the chance to do similar.

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  A nation that loves women's sport

  Research by Canadian Women & Sport shows that two in three Canadians (67%) ages 13-65 consider themselves fans of women's sport, which is the equivalent to more than 17 million people. While Matheson was in Europe learning, researching and educating herself on all things relevant in preparation for the creation of the NSL, this point really hit home.

  “It is different and it is behind what we have in Canada," she said. "In the places where men have been playing football and been the only people playing football for a lot longer, it's more ingrained and harder to switch to accept women playing football. It's definitely a strength here. England winning the Euros [in 2022] was sort of our London 2012 so, literally, we've had kind of a decade head start on this one.

  “We've got this generation that have been watching women's football for over a decade. They're kids that have grown up or they're adults that have kids and have put their kids in soccer, so we've already sort of got a generation of fan here, versus having to try and start the entire fanbase from scratch. I think that's a huge strength for us.”

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  Star power

  Many of the most recognizable names from this past generation are involved in this exciting new era, too. As well as Matheson being on the league side, Sinclair, the greatest goal-scorer in the history of international soccer, is part of the ownership group for the Vancouver Rise - which can count former national team goalkeeper, and Olympic hero, Stephanie Labbe as its general manager. Erin McLeod, meanwhile, another legendary shot-stopper with 119 caps to her name, will be playing for the Halifax Tides.

  Joining Vancouver and Halifax in the six-team division will be Montreal Roses, AFC Toronto, Calgary Wild and Ottawa Rapid, with them to play a 25-game regular season that runs from April to November in 2025. The initial salaries are impressive for an inaugural year and there are clear aims for expansion, with the goal to add two more clubs by 2027.

  “It's important for us, given the investment and time that our current franchise owners have put into the build of the league to date, that we're very thoughtful and mindful of who comes into the league next, what markets we're in, so we're working very closely with our board chair and other consultants to ensure that we have a proper process in place,” said Christina Litz, who has come onboard as president of the NSL.

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  Quality beyond the pitch

  Alongside someone like Jose Costa, for example, who helped form the Portuguese women's top-flight, Litz is one of many interesting hires who have wide-ranging sports experience that also makes the composition of the NSL's staff quite eye-catching. A lawyer by training with experience of media and digital marketing, she has worked at the Canadian Football League (CFL), in sports betting in horse racing and, most recently, with the National Hockey League (NHL) and the Winnipeg Jets.

  “Hopefully, I'm bringing years of experience from different sports, but the business is somewhat similar across the line, other than the fact that what we're dealing with here has the potential of being much more international in scope, which is also exciting,” Litz says.

  “Of all the time working on the men's professional side, almost from day one, it bothered me that the same attention wasn't being brought to the incredible [women] athletes that I knew were out there. Quite frankly, for my own professional career, I was sort of over it. I wanted to be part of the women's sports movement. I wanted to do whatever I could to bring this to life and I love the values that Diana was basing this league on. It was a bit of a no brainer.”

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  Evolving from NWSL ambitions

  Five or six years ago, rather than a whole domestic league, the big opportunity that most in Canada were talking about when it came to professional women’s soccer was in the U.S. Like Major League Soccer has Montreal Impact, Vancouver Whitecaps and Toronto FC, could the NWSL add a Canadian franchise?

  It’s something that Matheson admits she was “definitely advocating for” at the time but that, “the more you looked at it" the more it made sense to aim higher.

  “The goal here is to make sure Canada continues to compete at the global level and, more so, we can win World Cups. That's what we're trying to achieve here,” she explains. “NWSL, if we went that route, we'd end up with probably two teams over the long term. It would be Toronto, it would be Vancouver, and those two teams would be in two of the three markets that are the only markets in Canada that already have a high performance pathway for girls. That's where our national development centers are.”

  With it “likely” that the NWSL would put a limit on the number of Canadian players in each team, to avoid what could essentially be a national team playing pro in the division, it would then severely limit the impact at home, especially when compared to launching Canada’s own league.

  “We needed as many high quality environments as possible,” Matheson adds. “That's how we make sure Canada wins World Cups in the future, not by adding a U.S. pro team to two markets that are already serving players.”

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  Expanding pathways

  When the aims of the NSL are explained, the decision to take this route over the NWSL makes even more sense. The main goal is to create “more high quality professional pathways for more players”, capitalizing on the “massive grassroots participation rate” in the country.

  “Can we keep more of those players involved and going through high performance pathways to really strengthen the base that's feeding our national team?” Matheson asks.

  On top of playing opportunities and keeping young girls in sport longer, whether they turn pro or not, there are aims to positively impact the pathways for women coaches and referees, while Litz is passionate about getting more women involved on the business side, too.

  “Professional men’s sport doesn’t always do a great job of inviting people who are not like them to participate in the business side,” she says. “It's getting better, I would add, and certainly there's been a ton of progress. But suffice to say that is a huge motivator for all of us as well. We will be stronger by actually looking at the full population to fill jobs, not just half, or slightly more than half, of that population. Certainly, that's a goal for us as well.”

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  Encouraged by the CPL

  Meanwhile, the overarching goal of pushing Canada to win a World Cup is given hope by the impact that the Canadian Premier League (CPL) has had on the men’s national team. Founded in 2017, it’s no coincidence that Les Rouges have shown signs of major progress in the time since, with qualification for a first men’s World Cup since 1986 the headline achievement, but a fourth-placed finish at Copa America also impressive.

  “I think we are really starting to see the benefits at the men's national team with the CPL,” Litz notes. “I think they've had a few [players] that are coming through there and certainly the new Canadian men's national team coach, Jesse Marsch, has shown his full support for what's happening there. It's exactly what we're building there on our side too.”

  “[It's providing] more opportunities, right?” Matheson says. “There's been a national team pathway which only can have 60 players per year going through that, versus we have this talent and we're such a geographically large country that we're just capturing more of that upcoming talent and getting them in proper pathways to really widen that national team pool and get players on the team that we otherwise wouldn't have found or we would have missed.”

  How important will it be, then, for the new head coach of the women’s national team - the position is currently vacant - to show support to the NSL, value it and believe in its players?

  “It's super important,” Matheson replies. “I think there are a lot of players out there who are going to want to play in this league versus playing abroad. There's 150 Canadian women on some sort of pro contract abroad and the idea is, if we bring them home, get them in front of, week in and week out, a national team coach that's going to see them playing, they have a higher chance of being called into their women's national team pool.

  "That's absolutely an outcome we want to see and I know that'll be an important factor in finding the right coach here, that they believe in developing the game as a whole in Canada. I know that's the approach [Canada Soccer CEO] Kevin Blue took in hiring Jesse Marsch, so I know he'll be doing the same on the women's side.”

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  International ambitions

  But the NSL is not just about Canadians.

  “I would say the response from international [players] has been just as strong, to be honest,” Matheson goes as far to say. That’s perhaps no surprise. Yes, it’s still a small league that will need to grow and while the commitment among current owners gives Matheson and Litz little concern about sustainability, attendances will be important when everything kicks off.

  But the minimum salaries are already globally competitive, many of the athletes’ rights and best practices that are fought for across women’s soccer are already “baked in” to the NSL’s standard player agreement and there is a lot of support for women in sport in Canada, which is widely recognised as a wonderful place to live. It's certainly an appealing option and an influx of foreign talent will only elevate the NSL as it bids to become one of the best leagues in the world.

  Litz mentions that her experience working at the CFL has helped a lot in this role, but when she elaborates further on what she learned there that can be applied to the NSL, “the biggest difference” she is able to pick out is that she is part of something that can strive to compete with any league on the planet.

  “I don't know that we have to play second fiddle to anybody,” she says. “So, while out of the gate it's going to take us years to catch up to a couple of the incumbents in the world, based on the fact that we have one of the largest player pools in the world, and that we are starting to create an ecosystem for those players, why can't we be on equal footing and play and win at international cup challenges?

  "So I'm not taking second fiddle, which inevitably was the case a little bit with the CFL to the NFL. We're going to get there and it's going to take a few years, but there's every reason to believe we can be successful in that.”