Canada's World Cup Journey: From Forgotten Host to Football's Stage

Canada arrived at this World Cup as the “forgotten host”. It leaves it as something very different: a country that finally saw its men’s national team step out of the shadows and onto football’s main stage.

Jesse Marsch’s side did not just show up. They swung hard. They fought their way into the round of 16 – the furthest Canada has ever gone – before running into a ruthless Morocco and bowing out. Along the way came a string of firsts: first World Cup point, first World Cup win, first World Cup knockout victory. For a program that has spent decades on the margins, this was a leap, not a step.

“They shocked everyone,” fan Matt Lorincz said in Calgary. He was not exaggerating.

A hockey nation turns its head

Canada remains a country where ice hockey rules the sporting imagination and where Major League Baseball and NBA franchises hoover up commercial attention. Soccer is the most-played sport, yet for years it has lived as a weekend pastime rather than a national obsession.

This tournament cracked that hierarchy, at least for a month.

“Most people you talk to watch, like, hockey or other sports, right?” Lorincz said. “There’s not a lot of – or as many – soccer fans in Canada. So hopefully there may be a few more of those.”

For a few weeks in June and July, the country leaned in. Toronto’s downtown streets pulsed with the sound of games spilling out of bars, fans marching in colour and noise toward Toronto Stadium. On the west coast, Vancouver turned into a World Cup classroom, the city learning in real time what it means to host the sport’s biggest circus.

Canada’s 6-0 demolition of Qatar in Vancouver showed the high ceiling of Marsch’s team, a statement win that felt like a release of years of frustration. The mood only dimmed when Ismaël Koné, the team’s star midfielder, left on a stretcher with a broken leg after a heavy challenge. The roar turned to a hush; a night of celebration suddenly carried a scar.

By the time Switzerland beat Colombia in Vancouver in the round of 16, Canada’s role as co-host had officially wound down. The “forgotten” host had left a clear imprint.

A prime minister in the dressing room

On the political stage, Canada did not hide. Prime Minister Mark Carney, a committed sports fan with a wardrobe of jerseys to prove it, became the most visible leader among the three host nations. He was the only one to attend stadium games, embracing the chance to present Canada to a global audience.

After the win over Qatar, Carney went straight to the dressing room in Vancouver.

“You showed a level of character that some people never achieve in their life,” he told the players. “And you showed it when a good part of the country and the world is watching.”

Sports minister Adam van Koeverden called the World Cup a moment of maturity for a so-called “middle power”, saying Canada had been “growing up a little bit” and treating the chance to host the world as a “sincere privilege”.

The original bid, as former United Bid Committee executive director John Kristick recalls, rested on a simple idea: “one continent, three countries”. The reality has felt more lopsided. The United States, with its bigger stadiums, its share of the games and the political glare of the Trump era, inevitably dominated the limelight.

Kristick believes Canada and Mexico have found it harder to cut through as hosts. Yet inside Canada’s borders, there was no confusion.

“Every Canadian knows Canada is hosting it, and I think there’s been a great deal of national pride,” he said.

Toronto and Vancouver staged 13 of the tournament’s 104 matches. Not many on paper. Enough to change a country’s self-image.

Full bars, full stadiums – and a heavy bill

On the ground, the World Cup felt like a surge.

Ian Tostenson, head of the British Columbia Restaurant and Foodservices Association, described life in a host city as a crash course in “the enormity of the World Cup”. Bars and restaurants rode the wave. Alcohol sales climbed roughly 5% on last year, he said, as people poured in to watch.

“It raised the spirits of the entire province. I think the whole conversation [for the] last four weeks had been about soccer,” Tostenson said. In a period of economic headwinds, he drew a blunt conclusion: “You learn that if you give people a real reason to spend their money and give them value, they’ll spend it.”

The national balance sheet tells a more complicated story. Co-hosting has carried a price. Taxpayers have covered an estimated C$1.1bn to get Canada World Cup ready, with Toronto alone putting in around C$380m.

For City Councillor Josh Matlow, the math does not work.

“I don’t think that hosting the games made the city’s situation any better,” he said, pointing to already strained municipal finances.

Van Koeverden pushed back. He called the spending “prudent” and argued that the money flowed back through the economy. His vision of 2026 is simple: “Full stadiums, full parks, full restaurants, and full hotels is a nice problem to have.”

While politicians argued, visitors simply enjoyed themselves. Portugal manager Roberto Martinez said Toronto’s compact, temporary-expanded stadium reminded him of “old-fashioned Premier League grounds”, praising what he called “an incredible spectacle for football” after Portugal beat Croatia there.

Norwegian fan Gudmund Agotnes, in town for three matches, felt lucky with the draw. The experience, he said, was “pretty cool”, the temporary stands offering a “bird’s eye view” of both the pitch and the city skyline.

Forgotten host? Not to those who came.

A TV audience that rivalled hockey

Fifa announced that more than a million fans attended the opening 16 matches across the three host countries. With an expanded format, the tournament is on pace to surpass the 1994 record of 3.5 million cumulative spectators by the end of the group stage. The numbers are big, but they were expected.

The real shock came in Canadian living rooms.

The round-of-16 clash with Morocco on 4 July drew a peak of 11.7 million unique viewers in Canada, Bell Media reported. That made it the country’s biggest non-final World Cup audience on record. For context, the opening night of the NHL season last October attracted 9.8 million viewers overall.

Across the round of 32, World Cup matches averaged 1.9 million Canadian viewers. Hockey Night in Canada, the weekly institution, typically draws around 1.2 million. For a brief spell, Les Rouges went toe-to-toe with the national religion – and won.

Building a lasting soccer nation

Canada has not started from zero. The Vancouver Whitecaps, founded in 1973, and Toronto FC, launched 32 years later, have long carried the country’s flag in MLS. Recreational leagues brim with players. Yet the men’s national team has struggled to turn that base into sustained elite performance. The women’s side, ranked ninth in the world by Fifa, has led the way.

This World Cup run has begun to shift the balance.

Canada Soccer, the governing body, capitalised on the surge. It launched a fundraiser before the tournament with a C$25m target – and hit that mark months ahead of schedule. Money, for once, is flowing toward the sport rather than away from it.

In the stands and in bars, the effect was more emotional than financial. Fans of the men’s team, Les Rouges, simply revelled in seeing their side belong on this stage.

“It brought a lot of people together in a very kind of segregated world that we’re living in,” said Zeileen Reardon, watching the Morocco match in a Calgary bar. “So, I think it actually showed the world that we can come together, even for a game.”

For a nation often cast as a backdrop to someone else’s story, this World Cup changed the script. The question now is whether Canada treats this as a fleeting summer romance with football – or the start of a permanent relationship.