On 19 July, the extra time of the final between Spain and Argentina drew 15.7 million Spaniards to their television sets, more than eight in every ten screens that were switched on. It was a record and, at the same time, a predictable figure. In Spain, football has occupied that place for decades, and the title confirmed a position that nobody disputed.
A month earlier, something far stranger had happened 6,000 kilometres away. Canada's group-stage matches comfortably doubled the audience for the game that decided the Stanley Cup, the event that country experiences almost as a national liturgy. One of them, against Qatar, reached 11.7 million Canadians at some point during the broadcast. The NBA Finals, those same weeks, did not reach one million.
If the World Cup is measured by what it changed, and not by who lifted the trophy, the champion was Canada. Spain won a trophy in a country where football already had everything. Canada discovered that football could occupy the centre of its sporting conversation, something that ten years ago would have sounded like a joke.
Nor did it come from nowhere. Football was already the team sport most played by Canadian children, for a very prosaic reason. Enrolling a child in hockey costs more than 3,200 Canadian dollars a year between equipment and ice-rink hire, while football comes to around 450. For middle-class families and for a large part of the immigrant population, hockey had become an expensive sport and football the sensible one. What was missing was for that football-playing country to also sit down and watch it, and that is what the World Cup achieved.
The thesis begins to limp when the profit-and-loss account is opened. Spain collected its title instantly. The federation received 50 million dollars from FIFA, the players shared bonuses of close to 750,000 euros each, and LaLiga headed into the summer with its television rights freshly renewed upwards, in a European market that was falling. A football-mad country knows how to convert every success into money because it has had the machinery in place for decades.
Canada, on the other hand, discovered the less friendly face of hosting a World Cup. Soaring prices and fears of overcrowding scared off regular tourists and corporate travel, and hotel occupancy in June fell at both host cities. In Vancouver it dropped from 64 per cent to less than 48 per cent. The tournament brought fans, but drove away those who would have come anyway.
Nor has the fervour for the national team translated into club football. The Canadian Premier League closed the season with an average of 3,680 spectators per match. Millions of Canadians were thrilled by their national side and very few have swapped their Saturdays for a local-league stadium. The World Cup was experienced as a great event, but not yet as a passion.
Where Canada did profit was in the boardrooms. Canada Soccer, a federation with chronic financial problems, used the momentum to renegotiate the contract with the company that managed its commercial rights, a deal that had tied its hands for years. The new version projects more than 100 million additional dollars over the next twelve years. It is a less visible prize than a trophy, but it could weigh more heavily on the future of Canadian football.
The history of host nations without a football tradition counsels caution. The United States turned the 1994 World Cup into the origin of MLS, a league that three decades later has 30 teams and its own stadiums. South Korea, by contrast, saw attendance at its league rise by almost half after 2002 and then deflate, leaving enormous stadiums that nobody knew how to fill. A summer's worth of attention guarantees nothing, and the only difference between the two cases was what each country built when the spotlight went out.
Spain collected its title in July. Canada has ten years to collect its own.
