Canada Soccer men’s team to play Thursday

VANCOUVER –

Canada’s males’s soccer staff is again to coaching, however the gamers say there’s nonetheless work to be performed on reaching a brand new cope with the game’s nationwide governing physique.

A pleasant recreation in opposition to Panama was cancelled Sunday after the Canadian athletes refused to play, citing “unnecessarily extended” negotiations over a brand new contract. Coaching periods on Friday and Saturday have been additionally scrapped because of the contract dispute.

The gamers met with senior leaders of Canada Soccer on Sunday night time, and the staff resumed coaching on the Vancouver Whitecaps’ facility Monday. The group may even prepare Tuesday earlier than kicking off CONCACAF Nations League play in opposition to Curacao in Vancouver on Thursday. Canada Soccer stated Tuesday on Twitter that the sport will go forward.

“Canada Soccer and the lads’s nationwide staff gamers, who returned to coaching on Monday, confirmed that they look ahead to going through Curacao in CONCACAF Nations League,” Canada Soccer stated, including the group and gamers “are excited to see our followers (Thursday) at BC Place.”

The gamers stated in an announcement Monday that they “will proceed the negotiation course of, however questions have but to be answered and actions have but to be taken. We transfer ahead in hopes that Canada Soccer will work with us to resolve the state of affairs.”

Compensation seems to be a sticking level within the negotiations.

In an announcement launched Sunday, the gamers stated they’re asking for World Cup compensation that features 40 per cent of prize cash and a “complete family and friends bundle” for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Canada, ranked thirty eighth on the earth, clinched a spot within the event in March. It is the primary time the nation will play within the World Cup since 1986.

FIFA introduced on April 1 that the whole World Cup prize pool might be US$440 million, with the winner taking $42 million. Groups eradicated within the group stage will take house $9 million.

Canada Soccer president Nick Bontis informed reporters on Sunday that the group was providing gamers 30 per cent of the World Cup winnings.

He stated the proposal gamers have put ahead shouldn’t be financially viable.

“My job as president is a accountability to the fiduciary and secure well being of this group, not only for the final 120 years that we have been alive, however for the following 100 years we’ll be alive,” Bontis stated at a press convention. “And I can not settle for a suggestion that can put our group in a monetary place that’s untenable.”

The gamers are additionally asking for equitable compensation between the lads’s and ladies’s groups, sharing participant match charges and proportion of World Cup prize cash. They’re additionally asking for the event of a girls’s home league.

Final month, the U.S. Soccer federation signed historic collective bargaining agreements that included equal pay for its males’s and ladies’s nationwide groups.

Beneath the settlement, World Cup prize cash might be pooled after which divided among the many gamers, with U.S. Soccer taking 10 per cent of the pool from the 2022-23 tournaments and 20 per cent in 2026-27.

The U.S. acquired $4 million for profitable the 2019 Girls’s World Cup, the place the whole purse was $30 million.

FIFA President Gianni Infantio has proposed doubling the prize cash to $60 million for the 2023 Girls’s World Cup, wherein FIFA has elevated the groups from 24 to 32.

Canada’s girls’s nationwide staff put out an announcement Sunday night time saying they’re comfortable to listen to the lads’s staff name for equitable compensation. However the gamers famous that they don’t view equal percentages of winnings as equal pay.

“Now we have been clear all through these discussions (and earlier than) that we’re looking for and association with Canada Soccer that can present equal pay to members of our staff relative to the lads’s nationwide staff,” the assertion stated. “The ladies’s nationwide staff won’t settle for an settlement that doesn’t provide equal pay.”

Canada Soccer tabled presents for each the lads’s and ladies’s nationwide groups final week and the ladies’s staff stated whereas it was nonetheless trying on the deal, they consider it represents a “constructive step towards pay fairness” and “supplies a foundation for additional negotiations.”

“We look ahead to working with each Canada Soccer and the lads’s nationwide staff in the direction of a deal that gives true pay fairness and that advances the game of soccer in Canada, for the good thing about all of us,” the ladies’s staff stated.

– With recordsdata from The Related Press.

This report by The Canadian Press was first printed June 7, 2022.