Women's World Cup to Vancouver in 2015

Soccer, on the front lawn of Parliament Hill in Ottawa? You bet. A girls youth friendly match is scheduled for 2:15 p.m. Eastern Time May 4. before Canadian Soccer Association president Dominic Maestracci and FIFA president Sepp Blatter unveil the list of cities to host matches for the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup. One of the cities will be Vancouver. But you'll have to wait a bit longer to find out whether it hosts a semi-final, bronze medal match and/or the championship final. "The schedule will be released in the second half of 2012," said CSA communications manager Michele Dion. B.C. Place Stadium's only serious competition for the final is Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium. Olympic Stadium in Montreal is a darkhorse. Toronto will be hosting the 2015 Pan American Games, so BMO Field and Rogers Centre will be off limits. The British Columbia government committed $2 million of taxpayers funds to the CSA to bring matches to Vancouver. We do not know the full cost to taxpayers for the tournament. The federal government has promised at least $15 million. B.C. Soccer Association executive director Bjorn Osieck will be there, as part of a delegation of seven from the west coast for the weekend's annual general meeting. Maestracci faces a leadership challenge, as Canada's four professional clubs are backing candidate Rob Newman in the May 5 election. The SBC Insurance CEO, formerly from Saskatchewan, has been a CSA vice-president since 2006 and chairs the governance committee. The CSA will be patting itself on the back all weekend over so-called governance reforms. It's still an organization that has not met the challenge of transparency. If it really wants the public to believe in reform, the best, first step would be to release a financial report. Until then, it'll be up to us in the media to pay $5 to the government under the Access to Information Act to get a copy. Dion said Blatter will stay for the Saturday AGM and banquet. Will it be his last visit to Canada? Blatter is serving his third and final term as FIFA president after his 2011 re-election. The world's soccer governing body is under fire for allegations of widespread corruption.

Exclusive: Transparency 1 Canadian soccer secrecy 0

The FIFA Independent Governance Committee tabled its first report March 30 to FIFA at its headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. Read a Forbes summary here. The full report, by Mark Pieth (with input from Canadians Alexandra Wrage and James Klotz), is here. FIFA's procedures are diplomatically described as "insufficient." FIFA's response is best described as "baby steps." Transparency International issued this statement slamming FIFA for not immediately accepting and acting on all the recommendations. We're still no closer to finding out the story behind the ISL bribery scandal, despite well-respected Pieth urging FIFA publish the documents. FIFA's 2011 financial report shows a $36 million profit based on revenue of $1.07 billion and expenses of $1.034 billion. Meanwhile, closer to home, CONCACAF has announced that there is only one candidate to become the organization's next president. Jeffrey Webb, a banker from the Cayman Islands, will fill the post left vacant when bribery suspect Jack Warner quit in disgrace last year to avoid a FIFA investigation. The Canadian Soccer Association did not field a candidate and general secretary Peter Montopoli did not respond to my interview request. Webb appears to be reform-minded, but he will have to take demonstrative action to introduce transparency to overcome his stigma. At a time when the world of soccer is under pressure to root out any hint of corruption, CONCACAF appears close to rubber-stamping the presidency of a banker from a notorious tax haven. The optics aren't good. Speaking of the CSA, the governing body for the game in the biggest country (by land area) in CONCACAF does not publish its financial information -- even for its members! It publishes an annual report without financial statements. But it does submit audited statements to the Government of Canada annually to qualify for taxpayer funds via Sport Canada. I have exclusively obtained the CSA's 2010 financial statements, which show an $807,944 profit based on $16.163 million revenue and $15.355 expenses. The biggest sources of income were membership fees ($6.617 million), sponsorships and donations ($3.479 million) and taxpayer grants ($3.145 million). Read the full report below. Here's hoping the CSA does the right thing and proactively publishes its 2011 financial statements, instead of forcing a reporter to send a $5 cheque to the government.

CSA 2010 Report Mackin

An act of sod

Only in Vancouver would a well-drained, well-padded and eminently playable synthetic turf field be naively covered by grass for a weekend to please the vanity of a touring European soccer team.

Only in Vancouver would the organization that paid for the exercise be surprised that it can sometimes rain very hard in Vancouver and cost it more when it has to cancel a league match.

Another day in the trying expansion life of the Vancouver Whitecaps, who are languishing in last place of Major League Soccer during a season marred by injuries, red cards and the futile replacement of coach Teitur Thordarson with Tommy Soehn.

The Whitecaps hired English Lawns of North Vancouver to spend 30 hours to install and 30 hours to remove 90,000 square feet of sod for the July 18 visit by FA Cup champion Manchester City. The field was supposed to be tested once in a real MLS match situation with a July 16 visit from Real Salt Lake, but that was scuttled almost two-and-a-half-hours before kickoff because the grass was waterlogged.

Granted, Vancouver is enduring an unusually rainy July (normally the driest month) and the July 18 game is a gift to season ticketholders, who are getting in for free. Whitecaps’ chief executive Paul Barber outrageously proclaimed on Team 1040 that scuttling the Real Salt Lake match had nothing to do with the upcoming Manchester City match, part of the Herbalife World Football Challenge exhibition series.

Instead of Real Salt Lake being awarded a win for its trouble, the game was not forfeited. It will apparently be rescheduled sometime later this season and tickets from July 16 will be honoured. (Whitecaps’ co-owner Greg Kerfoot is a member of the MLS competition committee. When commissioner Don Garber visited Vancouver in February, he noted Kerfoot’s influence.)

Certainly the traveling Real Salt Lake fans have a good case to ask the Whitecaps for compensation for their travel bills. The game did not happen July 16 because of an act of God. It didn't happen because of an act of sod. The match would have been played, as scheduled and on-time, on the regular Empire surface. When one travels to a soccer match, he or she has a reasonable expectation that it will take place. Soccer is not baseball, the great American game they don't play in the rain.

Here is a little bit of history.

Empire Stadium opened for the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games with a natural grass surface that remained until 1970 when 3M’s artificial Tartan Turf artificial product was installed.

The Vancouver Whitecaps played North American Soccer League games there from 1974 to 1983 on the surface, which could be best described as a green layer of felt over concrete. Bob Lenarduzzi cited the wear and tear from Tartan Turf when he finally got a hip replacement in early 2010. Players enjoyed rainy nights, because that meant no rug burn on the crowned pitch. A very noisy truck that everyone called the “squeegee” would go to work to suck excess water from the carpet before matches on rainy days.

Tartan Turf was good enough for Manchester City when it played at Empire in 1980 and 1981. Lenarduzzi fondly remembers scoring once in the Whitecaps’ 5-0 beating of “the Blues” in 1980. The next year, the clubs tied 1-1. (Among the many international clubs hosted at the original Empire was Italy's AS Roma, featured in this video.)

The stadium was demolished in 1992 and used as a parking lot until 2001 when Empire Fields got a new lease on life -- and a natural grass pitch -- to become home of community soccer and softball.

But the field follies were not over. That grass field was removed and replaced by an AstroTurf GT synthetic surface when the temporary Empire Field 27,683-capacity stadium was built in 2010. The FIFA-approved AstroTurf GT product is good enough for Major League Soccer and Canadian Soccer Association competitions. The Empire surface is awaiting FIFA’s two-star certification.

Though there is some concern that the “tire crumbs” used in synthetic turf fields may irritate players’ lungs and skin through prolonged exposure, such fields are not injury magnets.

“Risk of injury on third-generation artificial turf in Norwegian professional football” in the British Journal of Sport Medicine found that between 2004 and 2007 there were 526 match injuries on grass and 142 on artificial turf. The study concluded “no significant differences were detected in injury rate or pattern.”

Researchers found 17.1 injuries per 1,000 match hours on grass and 17.6 injuries per 1,000 match hours on artificial turf.

The Manchester Citys of the world go abroad to bolster their brand, promote their sponsors, sell merchandise, recruit players and increase the international TV and online audience for their league matches. But the demand to play on temporary grass over a permanent synthetic pitch is akin to the famous Van Halen demand for brown and only brown M&Ms. It is frivolous.

I can hear the cries of soccer snobs already, deriding me for ignorance and blasphemy. Don't waste your time. I prefer to watch and play the world's greatest game on grass, but I have no complaints about the latest generation of high-quality synthetic fields. Manchester City's visit is for a relatively meaningless, one-off exhibition game. It is not for a multi-game tournament and no trophy is at stake.

Until teams like the Whitecaps either pay to have natural grass permanently installed in their stadiums or stand firm on the playability of their high-quality synthetic turf, foreign squads will exploit their sucker hosts and get what they want. Even if it means doing something which is totally contrary to the 21st century push by governments to be sustainable and friendly to the environment.

It takes a lot of energy to grow all that sod, transport it, unroll it, roll it up and take it away after a soccer match.

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Manchester City shutout Mexico's Club America 2-0 on July 16 in San Francisco, where the game was played at the San Francisco Giants' AT&T Park baseball stadium. It's rather odd that the so-called "Blues" (who wore their red and black striped kit in the Bay Area) would schedule a 7 p.m. news conference with the Whitecaps at Burnaby's EA Sports complex on July 17.

Sunday night news conferences are exceedingly rare in an economically difficult environment where the media is already challenged by tight resources and deadlines. Only a few people in the world can pull off Sunday night specials with success; I refer to the famous Obama-offed-Osama announcement of Sunday, May 1, 2011.