The Men’s World Cup will be a unique sporting event for Canadians – and not merely because it’s being co-hosted on Canadian soil or because soccer is now the most-played youth sport in Canada. The Canadian men’s national soccer team has the unique opportunity to forge a different vision of Canadian national identity – one that looks quite different from what hockey has historically offered. This tournament will be especially unique when compared to recent sporting events including the Four Nations Faceoff, the Milan Cortina winter Olympic Games and the Toronto Blue Jays’ World Series run last year. The difference lies not in the sport itself, but in who is wearing the Canadian jersey and the stories they carry onto the pitch.  

National sports and nation building

In Canada, hockey has historically been the sport used to symbolize Canadian national excellence and foster collective identity. However, it’s also an expensive sport that has long reflected a white, European conception of Canadian identity. The National Hockey League employs a workforce that is 84 per cent white across players and team staff, a reality reinforced by the composition of Canada’s men’s hockey team at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. The Toronto Blue Jays’ extraordinary run to the 2025 World Series was a moment that genuinely galvanized the country around baseball in ways not seen since the back-to-back championships of 1992 and 1993. The 2025 World Series prompted the entire country to root for “Canada’s team.”
Canadians rallied enthusiastically behind a team that played in Canada and wore the maple leaf, something their owners were happy to emphasize throughout the Jays’ run. Yet the Blue Jays presented their own identity puzzle. The team that Canada adopted as “Canada’s team” had only one Canadian player on its World Series roster: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. – who was born in Montréal and whose father played for the Montreal Expos – in a majority-American lineup. A lot of the national enthusiasm was likely stoked by Canada’s tense trade relationship with the United States and not Blue Jays players being directly representative of the lived experiences of most Canadians.  

A squad built on multiculturalism

Canada’s men’s soccer team presents a different image: a racially diverse squad whose players embody stories of immigration, offering a more inclusive vision of what Canadian identity can look like. No player embodies this more than Canada’s team captain, Alphonso Davies. Born in the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana to Liberian parents who had fled the civil war, he arrived in Edmonton at age five through Canada’s resettlement program. He is now a Champions League winner and a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. But it goes beyond Davies. Head coach Jesse Marsch, who took over from John Herdman in 2024, has made the recruitment of dual nationals an explicit priority. He recruited players like Tani Oluwaseyi, who could have declared for Nigeria; Niko Sigur, who played for Croatia at the under-21 level; Marcelo Flores, who competed for Mexico at various youth levels; and Alfie Jones, an English-born centre-back who learned the Canadian national anthem from a teammate before taking his citizenship oath at training camp. The result is a squad built largely from immigrants and dual nationals who were actively courted to represent Canada, reflecting a vision of the country shaped by multiculturalism rather than ethnic homogeneity. This carries historical resonance: Canada’s past policies once explicitly favoured white, European immigrants, provoking a countervailing push toward official multiculturalism. It is precisely this multicultural framework that’s made the squad possible and given Canada unprecedented strength and depth.  

The power of recognition

National sporting events are powerful vehicles for building shared identity. When people connect to sporting events in ways that make their sense of belonging to a country feel personal, sport becomes something more than entertainment. This World Cup arrives at a politically charged moment, with the United States – a co-host alongside with Mexico – planning to involve immigration enforcement in tournament security. Canada’s multicultural squad offers a counter-narrative in a tournament already shadowed by debates about immigration and belonging. For the millions of Canadians who immigrated to Canada or who carry their family’s immigration story as a major part of their sense of identity, the men’s national soccer team offers something that the men’s Olympic hockey squad and the Toronto Blue Jays never quite delivered: the possibility of seeing themselves in a more complete representation of Canada’s team. That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the realization of the full potential of sport in building Canadian national identity. Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Western University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Expert Insight reflects the perspective and scholarly interest of Western faculty members and is not an articulation of official university policy on issues being addressed.