Taking on Lenarduzzi’s take on Canadian player development

Bob Lenarduzzi PHOTO: CANADA SOCCER/PEPE

Love him or hate him, Bob Lenarduzzi’s autobiography makes for interesting reading. There are many interesting anecdotes from a lifetime of playing and promoting soccer in Vancouver.

There are fascinating chapters about how unhappy the Whitecaps’ English players were after winning the 1979 NASL Soccer Bowl, because no bonuses were paid. From his chapters about being coach of the national team, Lenarduzzi suggests that striker Tomasz Radzinski wasn’t popular with his teammates, and also tells a story of how Canada’s gear got stolen during a Central American road trip.

It’s a quick, breezy read — and Lenarduzzi doesn’t hang certain players in print like you know that he likely could. After all, he is still the president of a Major League Soccer franchise, and it’s dangerous to burn any bridges. It’s more of a personal memoir than a tell-all book.

But there is one chapter that will be the focus of the rest of this article: Lenarduzzi, as president of the Whitecaps and a former national-team coach, has a strong opinion on Canadian player development.

And in it, he defends the Whitecaps’ lack of Canadians on its senior roster — and how he envisions more Canadians cracking MLS in the future.

As Canadian fans will recall, before the 2011 MLS season, the league had a special rule for Toronto FC’s roster. Here it is, verbatim from the old MLS rulebook:

“Each team is allotted eight (8) International slots, with the exception of Toronto FC who is allotted 13 International slots, five (5) of which may be used on domestic U.S. players. All International player slots are tradable, therefore a team may have more than or less than eight (8) International players on its roster.”

But, before Vancouver came in, there was a fight to reduce the Canadian quota. Now, Canadian MLS teams are required to carry just three eligible Canadians on each roster. And, in Vancouver’s case in the second half of 2011, that meant having a Swiss player who was born in Canada (Alain Rochat) and two Canadians who weren’t factors in the starting XI; Russell Teibert and Philippe Davies.

It’s interesting that, in the book, Lenarduzzi said that the original pre-2011 season plan was to lower the limit to two Canadians per Canadian team.

From the book: “The CSA approach to Major League Soccer is enough to make me pound my head against the wall. There’s a Canadian content rule situpulating that two Canadians must be on each Canadian MLS roster. The CSA wanted it increased. After much debate, MLS got it increased to three…”

Lenarduzzi wrote that until a committee formed by MLS and the Canadian Soccer Association to determine when the quota can be increased is an important step, “Otherwise, we could be adding Canadian players who actually could make our team weaker, which is ridiculous, especially when you remember that it’s the CSA that created the mess the game is in right now.”

Lenarduzzi said it’s up to pro clubs to find better ways to bring Canadian players through the system, and that the number of Canadians will rise on merit, not because of a quota.

Now, before I get into my rebuttal of Lenarduzzi, I have to say that I like the man. When he was the national team coach and I was a poorly equipped CONCACAF writer for World Soccer, I remember how gracious he was to call me from a hotel room in Mexico City after Canada got yet another Azteca spanking. When the Canadian team of ’86 was inducted into the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame, I chatted with Lenarduzzi and he told me how his greatest lament was how we as a nation never built on the team’s success; how it was bittersweet to be a part of the only Canadian team to play at the World Cup.

But, as well-intentioned as I believe Lenarduzzi is, I can’t agree with his stance on the Canadian quota. And here’s why:

1. “Canadian players who actually could make our team weaker.” Anyone who followed Toronto FC’s first four seasons in Major League Soccer knows it wasn’t the Canadian players who were the issue with the team; it was the imports brought in from England, Scotland, Argentina, France. Name the biggest busts in TFC history, and none of them are Canadian players. There is actually a wide Canadian talent pool. Toronto FC tried to sign Canadian Mozzi Gyorio from NASL this season, but couldn’t make a deal with Tampa. FC Edmonton has several players who could at least walk into an MLS reserve team. The Canadian MLS clubs didn’t scout the Canadian university championships. Only FC Edmonton wants to bother with Canadian collegiate players. The truth is, a lot of domestic doors aren’t opened when Canadian players come knocking. And, I have a hard time believing, when I look at the amount of American footsoldiers on Canadian MLS clubs, that Canadians of similar skill sets aren’t available.

2. Why is it that Dutch coaches, like Toronto FC’s Aron Winter and FC Edmonton’s Harry Sinkgraven, are more prone to play Canadian players than we see in Montreal and Vancouver? Because the Dutch preach a system where local players have to be used as a resource — right from the get-go. There’s no point in waiting for things to get better. You can’t build a team on imports; instead, you bring in the right imports to augment a group of local players who have grown into a team together. Did Toronto FC improve when Ashtone Morgan and Matt Stinson got more playing time? Yes. No, you can’t say that Morgan and Stinson were reasons why TFC looked so much better in the final third of the season and qualified for the CONCACAF Champions League quarter-finals. But you CAN say that the club saw that these two young Canadian were NOT going to make the team worse, and that they deserved the chance to play. And, in fact, Morgan impressed enough to earn a national-team call-up.

3. As for the pro clubs developing talent, Lenarduzzi is right on. The academies can develop talent. But where does this leave soccer players who grow up in Saskatchewan, Manitoba or the Atlantic provinces? You see, getting to an academy requires major sacrifices. In most cases, a young player’s family has to pay to get their child to a trial. And that’s a massive barrier for many Canadians. So, the academies still tend to be open to local players. So, Vancouver, Edmonton, southern Ontario and the Montreal area are handled. The rest would be out in the cold. If Lenarduzzi supports the notion that the clubs will figure out development, then, logically he should support any move for Canadian expansion. Geography is a greater barrier for our national soccer development than any other factor. When we see the MLS teams sink money into scouts that scour all 10 provinces, then I could trust Lenarduzzi on this point.

4. Lenarduzzi’s plan also doesn’t take into account the human factor. If we were all Vulcans, able to pack our emotions away, then we could be patient and wait for a system to breed better players. But, what happens along the way? Coaches and GMs are under constant pressure, so they look past the Canadian players and try to bring in name imports to boost their teams. That’s human nature. And when that import runs put of steam, another is brought in. There’s always the temptation to go out into the import market, especially as we see the European economy go into the toilet. When teams and leagues in Europe begin to fail, more European players will be available and willing to work for less — which will smash headfirst into any kind of Canadian-player development plan. We know that in leagues where there is no salary cap or a soft cap, owners who are captains of industry turn into drunken sailors. With a low Canadian quota, you actually create an environment where there is no patience, that foreign prospects are just loaded and then reloaded onto rosters. Remember that coaches and GMs fight to keep their jobs on a daily basis, so there is always the emotional push-back to take the quick-fix over a long development strategy.

For too long, we have heard that Canadian players aren’t good enough. If the MLS/CSA task force would want to have me, I’d love to drop a series of file folders on their desks on Canadian players who were cut by MLS teams but are doing well in Europe (like Tomer Chencinski and Chris Pozniak), the number of Canadian NASL players who could be MLS players to watch, and the number of Canadian players who are playing well in lower English divisions and European leagues — players who could be lured by MLS contracts and the chances to play closer to home.

Lenarduzzi needed only to watch the sorry performance of his Whitecaps — which started no Canadians (I refuse to count Rochat) — to know that putting imports together doesn’t always work.

Bob Lenarduzzi and Jim Taylor, Bob Lenarduzzi: A Canadian Soccer Story (Harbour Publishing)