Canada Soccer’s Olympic espionage debacle has lifted the veil on years of turmoil inside the organization racked by internal and financial problems, and which has been criticized for a lack of transparency.
In nearly 40 interviews with people tied to Canada Soccer, Radio-Canada has learned of infighting and fears of funds being mismanaged as a deal with a third party has stripped its teams of their ability to make profits.
Canada Soccer has been mired in scandal despite the recent success of both the men’s and women’s national teams.
Radio-Canada has interviewed employees, players, former players, executives, coaches and agents. Almost all of them requested that their names not be used in this report because they feared repercussions.
They raised numerous issues: lack of transparency, spending of public funds, financial opacity, a mysterious deal with a private firm, allegations of favouritism, widespread spying and a toxic environment.
“It’s a hornet’s nest, everyone’s keeping their mouth shut,” said one former executive.
The prevailing view among the sources who spoke to Radio-Canada was that, for the past two decades, the administrators of Canada Soccer prioritized loyalty to federation bosses and their own interests.
Case in point: Canada Soccer executives negotiated a deal with Canada Soccer Business (CSB), a private firm, which took effect in 2019. The deal saw Canada Soccer give CSB broadcast rights for Canadian national team games and the right to unilaterally negotiate sponsorship deals and claim all revenue from those deals.
Canada Soccer has never publicly revealed the details of this deal. Radio-Canada obtained documents outlining the agreement. TSN first reported on it in 2022.
In exchange, Canada Soccer gets between $3 and $3.5 million a year — and an extra $500,000 during 2024, 2025 and 2026 because Canada is playing host to the FIFA World Cup in 2026.
Canada Soccer has also been spending $1 million per year to CSB to support the newly launched Canadian Premier League.
According to financial experts who spoke to Radio-Canada, the deal is likely extremely lucrative for CSB, but the company’s earnings are hidden. “All partnership agreements are commercially confidential,” CSB says.
Players and board members alike, in interviews, have decried the deal as unfair.
The Canadian Soccer Players’ Association, which represents the Canadian women’s team, has filed a $40-million lawsuit against 15 current and former board members of Canada Soccer alleging the CSB deal constitutes “negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.”
The deal appears to have been mainly negotiated by former Canada Soccer president Victor Montagliani, an insurance businessman from Vancouver who in the past 20 years has gone from Canada Soccer board member to heading the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) and the vice-president of FIFA.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, on March 29, 2018, CSB founder Scott Mitchell thanked Montagliani for the deal, calling him “the creator of this opportunity.”
But minutes from board meetings at the time reveal the board was still debating whether to go ahead with it.
A former board member who was present at those meetings told Radio-Canada that several members expressed their disapproval.
“There were a few of us who were uncomfortable,” he said. “We wanted more information. Several clauses were not in the best interests of Canada Soccer.”
The deal’s negotiation was essentially presented to the board as a fait-accompli, the board member said.
“All this stuff happened behind closed doors,” he said, praising the female soccer players for their legal action. “If I were them, I’d probably do the same thing.”
An attempt to conceal business dealings
When a parliamentary committee looked into Canada Soccer’s finances following the Olympics espionage scandal, Canada Soccer sought to have “all copies” of its deal with CSB destroyed, according to a letter from the federation sent to the committee.
Members of the committee did not accept the condition.
“It was completely unacceptable and it didn’t make any sense,” said Anthony Housefather, the Liberal MP for Mount Royal and one of the elected officials on the parliamentary committee.
Housefather, who is also a commercial lawyer, told Radio-Canada he had to ask the soccer organization to disclose its financial statements, which it had not been doing for several years despite receiving taxpayer subsidies.
Once Housefather got hold of the CSB contract, he says alarm bells started ringing. For one, the Canada Soccer board of directors had not properly approved of the contract, which, to him, essentially renders it invalid.
“The board of directors could have gone to court to say that there are procedural problems with this contract. It was not approved properly. I don’t understand at all,” Housefather said.
What’s more, Housefather said, the contract’s terms deprive Canada Soccer of its revenues.
“I have never seen anything like it,” he said.
Sébastien Lemire, the Bloc Québécois MP for Abitibi—Témiscamingue, said he was also shocked by Canada Soccer’s defensiveness and attempts at concealing the inner workings of its finances.
“People are protecting themselves” and “trying to cover up the truth,” Lemire said. “There are truths that need to come out. The culture of sports in Canada, particularly soccer, is one of money and cover-up.”
Canadian soccer players on both men and women’s teams have struggled to reach salary agreements with their teams, despite the sport’s growing popularity in the country.
Created in 1912, the Canadian Soccer Federation now has nearly a million members, making it the largest sports organization in the country.
For every registration on a local team, a $9 share is donated to Canada Soccer — an amount that will rise to $13 this year.
Last year, Canada Soccer also received nearly $4.8 million in government grants, much of which is dedicated to women’s and youth programs through the Olympic program called “Own the Podium.”
Andrea Neil, a former captain of the women’s team, said there has long been a culture of secrecy within Canada Soccer.
“Most people don’t realize the extent of what’s going on,” Neil said in an interview. “Part of the reason the problems persist is that there are some people who are exploiting them for personal gain.”
Neil and several others say they have asked, over and over: “Where is the money?”
Due to lack of funds, Neil said the organization had cancelled several training camps and friendly matches. When players of the national team held a strike in 2023, executives claimed Canada Soccer was at risk of bankruptcy.
“Where exactly does the money go? We don’t know,” said Claude Mathieu, expert in corporate financing and head of the financial crime program at Université de Sherbrooke. “It’s very difficult to conclude based on the financial statements.”
Mathieu analyzed hundreds of pages of Canada Soccer’s finances and called it a “very opaque structure.”
For example, Canada Soccer doesn’t disclose the salaries, compensation or benefits of its executives. It’s also unclear how it uses the government subsidies it receives. A Radio-Canada source within the federal government said, “We requested an audit, as was the case for Hockey Canada, because we knew there was a problem.”
A financial audit is still ongoing, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Canadian Heritage, which oversees sports federations.
Mathieu believes Canada Soccer “is in danger” because of its deal with CSB.
The man behind the deal
Mitchell, the businessman who heads CSB, also heads Hamilton Sports Group, which operates the Hamilton Tiger Cats football team and Forge FC, a soccer club that is part of the Canadian Premier League, which he co-founded.
Mitchell said he wants soccer to be successful in Canada. “Soccer is a global sport with huge potential in our country. This was clearly the case when we started investing and it is still clearly the case today,” he said in a statement.
Mitchell’s involvement with Canada Soccer runs deep. In addition to his ownership of CSB, he controls One Soccer, the platform that broadcasts the national team games. He also helped orchestrate a match between Canada and the U.S. in January 2022 which was held at a stadium in Hamilton, where Mitchell has a deal with the city to use the stadium.
Canada Soccer did not respond to Radio-Canada questions about why the Hamilton stadium was chosen over stadiums in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton or the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, which have larger capacities.
For his part, Mitchell believes his investments are helping to raise the profile of Canadian soccer. “We have invested, and continue to invest, enormous amounts of capital in the Canadian soccer ecosystem,” he insists, while accusing Radio-Canada of having “a fundamental misunderstanding of how [his] company operates and what Canadian Soccer Business has created in Canada.”
Mathieu, the financial expert, calls Mitchell’s position in the negotiation with Canada Soccer “questionable.”
“He’s on both sides of the coin,” Mathieu said. “When taxpayers’ money ends up in the hands of a company that delegates part of its activities to a private firm, it’s a bit of our money that ends up in the pockets of that individual.”
Philippe-Antoine Lupien, a specialist in sports economics at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), agrees it’s important to question whether the deal between Canada Soccer and CSB is unfair, but notes he understands the business interest in soccer.
“It’s an interesting market and it smells like cash … because in Canada that market is booming,” Lupien said.
Canada Soccer says it is working behind the scenes to review its agreement with CSB.
“We’ve offered to modify [the agreement],” said Mitchell. But “frequent changes within the leadership” of Canada Soccer “has complicated the task and has constantly been an obstacle to making progress in this direction.”
Canada Soccer said “progress has been made” in terms of the federation’s “governance structures and financial practices.”
“Previous practices” such as the purchase of electronic equipment and clothing for board members “no longer exist,” and executives no longer fly business class, the organization noted.
In early 2024, Canada Soccer hired a new CEO, Kevin Blue.
Blue has called the players on the men’s and women’s national teams “our biggest resource” and has vowed to improve the organization’s finances.
