Canada Marsches on
Will I ever stop using puns with the name of the Canadian men's national team coach in newsletter headlines? Not today. PLUS: Some very bad NFL trades
Sometimes, you just have to take the L.
When Canada Soccer hired Jesse Marsch as the new head coach of its men’s national team in May, I was among the (many) skeptics of the move. The American coach had built an impressive resume in MLS and then Austria, but his two previous gigs, in the German and English top tiers, had each lasted just a matter of months.
At Leeds United things had been particularly grim. He was hired mid-season and saved them from relegation from the Premier League, but then struggled the following season and was fired in February. They ended up relegated anyway. Even allowing for the fact that English fans tend to be suspicious of American coaches, and not just in the manner portrayed on Ted Lasso, Leeds supporters couldn’t get him out of town fast enough. They said Marsch had run his players into the ground, that he had tried to be far too aggressive with a squad that lacked the depth and quality of most of its Premier League rivals — basically that he had tried to coach Leeds in a manner befitting a club that was much more talented than they were.
Also he had been passed over for the U.S. job when the Americans decided to rehire Gregg Berhalter, whose contract had run out amid an ugly squabble with a star player’s parents.
It was fair to wonder if Canada Soccer had hired Marsch because they believed in his ability or because he had held some big jobs and was at least willing to do this one.
Four months on, he has pretty much shut up people like me. His Canadian team made it to the semi-finals of Copa America, with wins over Peru and Venezuela in the process, and over the past week beat the United States in America for the first time since the 1950s and drew against Mexico in a game they dominated for much of the first half.
Those latest results are technically meaningless since they were just international friendlies, but there is no denying the impact that Marsch has had on the Canadian team in a short time. He remade the central defence with the first-choice pairing of Derek Cornelius and Moise Bombito. Cornelius had been playing club football in Sweden and Bombito in MLS, but their strong performances in Canada jerseys must have been contributing factors to each getting transferred this summer to the French top flight. Cornelius is now with Marseille and Bombito with Nice, both big clubs with aspirations to be among the better teams in Ligue 1.
Elsewhere he handed goalkeeping duties to Maxime Crepeau and Dayne St. Clair — farewell to Milan Borjan and his glorious sweatpants — and gave more regular game time to youngsters like Jacob Shaffelburg, Liam Millar, Mathieu Choiniere, and Ali Ahmed.
Shaffelburg’s deployment on the left wing is a result of Marsch’s other big decision — moving superstar Alphonso Davies to left back, where he plays his club football with Bayern Munich. In the John Herdman era, Davies usually played on the left wing, for the simple reason that he’s the team’s best player and they were trying to get the ball to him in dangerous spaces.
But Marsch has evidently decided that Davies is too much of an asset at left back to have him move into a different position when he plays for his country. It’s widely believed that Real Madrid, arguably the biggest club in the world, plans to sign Davies to play left back in 2025, which if nothing else seems like a reasonable endorsement of Marsch’s way of thinking toward the player. Davies has also quite evidently signed off, as he was named team captain and in recent months has taken a much more visible leadership role. It might not seem like much that Davies is sitting for television interviews and posting videos through Canada Soccer’s official channels, but it’s a big step for a player who was rarely asked to speak on behalf of the team.
Marsch was in an unusual spot upon his arrival because Canada’s co-host role at the 2026 World Cup means its on-pitch results don’t count for much. There’s no qualifying tournament to try to wade through, which for 36 years in between World Cup appearances was more than Canada could handle. The new coach had time to try to mould and shape the squad to his liking.
Except international soccer is full of stories of teams and coaches who had messy breakups during the build-up to tournaments, even after qualifying was assured. Sometimes a run of bad form is all that’s needed to cause the national federation to smash the Eject button. USA Soccer, as it happens, fired Berhalter after the Americans didn’t get out of the group stage of Copa America, not wanting to wait to see if he could turn things around before the World Cup at home.
Marsch and Canada Soccer couldn’t be farther away from those kinds of recriminations. They were already in the honeymoon phase, and after the results of last week, it’s now an extended one.
The Worst Trade Bowl
It is not often you can say a player might be part of the worst trade in NFL history and not be accused of hyperbole. But in quarterbacks Bryce Young and Deshaun Watson, we are witnessing two of the very worst, playing out in the same season. What a time to be alive.