In a damaging debacle that started out in slow motion before picking up speed and rapidly running away from them, Canada Soccer managed to sour at worst some of the feel-good factor that the team had worked so hard to build up. Twelve months of positivity and light shadowed in just two weeks of bumbling bureaucracy.
Prime minister Justin Trudeau immediately labelled the match “a bad idea”. Families of the victims of PS752 lashed Canada Soccer, who initially tried to stand their ground, arguing that the “power of sport” meant this was all a good thing. When Iranian officials revealed they would be paid C$400,000 for the game, making a profit on a friendly for the first time in 22 years, things snowballed further.
The 30,000-plus tickets already sold were refunded but the mess didn’t simply end with one right decision finally being made. There was a fresh scramble to find someone, anyone to fill the slot, with Panama, an all-too familiar foe, stepping in. Iran, who will face both the US and England in Qatar, aren’t going away quietly, with officials there saying they’ll sue Canada Soccer for C$10m over the cancellation.
that Canada could become “a football nation”. Their efficiency and execution had helped imbue a sense that after decades of dysfunction, Canada Soccer had its house in order and was able to move in step with two modern, ambitious national teams. The Iran affair has been the record scratch to so much of that. In a country where the battle for sporting hearts and minds, not to mention marketing dollars and media space, is ferocious, its damage may not yet be fully realized.