Winnipeg’s professional men’s soccer club, Valour FC, announced Friday it has suspended operations.
The club, which played in the Canadian Premier League, issued a statement thanking fans, players and staff.
The club says it will fulfil contractual obligations toward players and staff until the end of the year. Players under contract past the 2025 season will become free agents or return to parent clubs, the statement said.
Fans holding credits in their ticket accounts will receive full refunds and the club will contact account holders with details and next steps, according to the statement.
“I had heard and, unfortunately, knew it was coming. I think it’s really, really disappointing,” said Rob Gale, Valour’s first head coach and general manager, who was relieved of his duties in September 2021.
“Yeah, bitterly disappointed in the way it’s gone since I left the organization.”
The team was owned by the Winnipeg Football Club, which runs the CFL’s Blue Bombers. The organization treated Valour as “a tax writeoff and an afterthought,” according to Gale.
Bombers president and CEO Wade Miller declined an interview request from CBC.
Gale said he and other Valour coaches created initiatives designed to build the relationship between the team and the city, such as working with local players to develop the youth soccer system in Winnipeg.
“I think the first year we had 11 Manitobans, so there was a real connection to the community,” he said, adding that seemed to work.
“We had a couple of games well over 10,000 fans in that first year. And I think we averaged the highest number of fans and had the least amount of debt in that first year.”
But coming out of the COVID-19 years, the team was abandoned by the Winnipeg Football Club, according to Gale.
“Unfortunately, what became very apparent to us is a lot of our good ideas for the community and the development organization would be used for the Bombers’ student initiatives,” he said.
“And I think Valour then just became an inconvenience rather than the project that it should have been, and what it could have been to our community.”
Gale said after he and assistant coach Damian Rocke left the team, “there really was no connection or effort to bring in new fans, market [the team], or bring in the immigrant population in Manitoba, which is so vibrant and so supportive of soccer.
“Unfortunately, it’s clearly been mismanaged and left to go to waste.”
Jeremy Shields, a Valour fan from Day 1 and a member of Red River Rising, the rabid group of Valour supporters, said he’s still trying to process the news.
“It’s heartbreaking, kind of switching between anger and frustration and sadness, and swapping stories with people that we’d go to the games with,” he said.
Kyle Gilson, another devoted fan, could only describe his initial feelings in single words: “Betrayal, anger, sadness. Gutted.”
Like Gale, Shields said it never felt like the WFC cared about the success of Valour FC.
“It felt like bare minimum all the time … in terms of the investment to staffing, to the coaching, to even trying to do player recruitment,” he said.
“It just felt like we were sort of there to check a box, to sort of say this stadium isn’t just for the Bombers, it’s for others. But it really did feel like second priority all the time.”
It took more than 25 years for Winnipeg to get another professional soccer club after the Canadian Soccer League folded and took the Winnipeg Fury with it in 1992.
Shields hopes it doesn’t take as long for the Canadian Premier League to fill the gap in its circuit.
“I think if you want to be a national league you’ve got to have some connection in the middle of the country. But right now it feels pretty sad, pretty hopeless.”
Valour fans were passionate but the WFC failed to tap into it, Gilson said.
“We have the support. It’s the lack of understanding the [soccer] culture around that support [by WFC],” he said.
Fans would attend player training sessions, not just games. They’d sing and chant while payers were just stretching, Gilson said.
“But as the mismanagement went, the hardcore footy fans just stopped caring, unfortunately.”
Valour’s shaky financial ground began soon after.
In 2022, the WFC reported a $950,000 loss from operating the soccer team. The football club reported Valour lost $1.25 million in 2023.
The Canadian Premier League agreed to cover the club’s operating costs in 2024 with a loan, with a similar agreement in place this season.
Valour finished sixth in the eight-team league last season, at 7-16-5.
“I gave four years of my life to that football club and organization, and everybody who knows me knows how much I wanted that to be successful. But I wasn’t backed or resourced,” said Gale, now head coach of the Portland Thorns FC.
“I’ve had success elsewhere because I’m backed by organizations and people that know how to run football clubs properly.”
Gale, who still calls Winnipeg his hometown, believes a pro soccer club would be a success in the city with the right ownership.
“We are in discussions to try and bring a Northern Super League, hopefully, team there on the women’s side, and I’d love to see someone come in and help, or I’d like to get behind, bringing Valour back to what it could be,” he said.
Hector Vergara, executive director of the Manitoba Soccer Association, said he’s not willing to throw in the towel on pro soccer in Winnipeg.
Having a franchise helps grow the sport at the amateur level and develop players, coaches and referees in the system, he said.
But for it to succeed, it needs a proper venue. Princess Auto Stadium is great for 25,000-30,000 spectators but soccer needs something that seats 4,000-10,000, Vergara said.
He insists the Ralph Cantafio Soccer Complex on Waverley Street could serve that purpose with proper upgrades.
We will work with the soccer community to continue to support any possibilities of bringing a professional entity [back],” he said.
“We have ideas and we have a lot of passion for the game and we have a lot of constructive comments that we can provide in order to support the development of that facility for a professional franchise.”
He didn’t want to comment on how the WFC managed the soccer club.
“I don’t have the internal knowledge of how they operated the team. All we know is that it didn’t work,” he said.
Winnipeg’s professional men’s soccer team, Valour FC, suspended operations on Friday after seven seasons as one of the original franchises in the Canadian Premier League.
