Your Canadian Soccer League Update

Self-consciously similar to the CFL Logo

Yes, among Canada's oldest professional league competitions, it's the Canadian Soccer League. Toronto FC fans will know it for providing TFC a simulacrum of youth development (TFC Academy), and the rest of us know it from stumbling onto it late on a Sunday evening on cable access television.

Amazingly, the CSL, formerly the the CPSL, formerly the CNSL, and before that the NSL, has lobbied the CSA to have their champion included in the Nutrilite Canadian Championship, joining the one MLS and two USL entries for CONCACAF Champions League qualification, so it's important we like, keep one lazy, half open eye on them. I mean just imagine: Toronto Croatia playing Toronto FC at BMO Field in a do-or-die for a gruelling international tournament played mosly in Central America? Toronto's Serbian White Eagles winning the CONCACAF Champions League and going head to head with Real Madrid in Japan for a taste of glory? Yes, feel the glory of the theoretically possible.

Moving along, the CSL is as competively futile as ever. There are ten teams split 6-4 between a National (with the mysteriously spelled Trios-Rivieres Attak first on 21 points) and International Division (Toronto Croatia first on 26) with a playoff round featuring eight teams. London City are on 2 points, and the Astros on 7, so there is a slight chance either might miss out on the playoffs. Fingers crossed.

The best we can hope for is a hotly contested Serbia White Eagles/Toronto Croatia playoff match up. If these teams meet expect record crowds of two to three hundred, largely to shout offensive wartime slogans from their cracking, concrete stands, with little attention paid to action on field. I myself somehow survived one of these derbies, but sadly my request for airtime on Football Factories has yet to receive a response.