Living the Dream: How NSL founder Diana Matheson is determined it remain a reality

CBC

16-04-2025

Canadian Press photos / Illustration by Sophie Baron CBC
Apr. 16, 2025
It's hard to pinpoint the starts of dreams, or why they come when they come, but Diana Matheson's vision for a professional women's soccer league in Canada first shimmered through the tears of defeat.
At the 2012 Olympics in London, Matheson and her devastated teammates watched the Americans celebrate an improbable 4-3 semifinal victory after extra time. The Canadians had been ahead, 3-2, after a hat trick from captain Christine Sinclair. A dubious Abby Wambach penalty and Alex Morgan's stunner at the death felt, to the women on the field at least, like the end of something beautiful.
Instead, it was the beginning. The Canadians rallied to claim bronze over France two days later, thanks to a late goal from Matheson, and through happier tears, women's soccer came into our collective field of view. The quality of that improbable run — its intensity, its controversy, its passion, its charm — made the unequivocal case that women's soccer was worthy of more than our occasional attention.
It demanded following.
By the end of the year, the National Women's Soccer League had been founded in the U.S., and Matheson, who began her professional career in Norway, joined the Washington Spirit, a little closer to home. Over the next eight seasons, which included a stretch in Utah and injury-marred visits to Seattle and Kansas City, Matheson found herself staring into stadium lights, hearing the noise of steadily growing crowds, dreaming some more.
Those dreams will become an overdue reality on April 16, when the Vancouver Rise host the Calgary Wild at BC Place, kicking off the inaugural season of the Northern Super League, Canada's first professional women's soccer league.
'I'm a big believer in knowing what the end in mind is,' Matheson said in a recent interview, a few frantic days before the NSL's opening night. John Herdman, her former coach for the national team, had taught her the value of a specific imagination: What does it feel like? What does it sound like? What does it look like to other people?
Following Matheson's retirement from competitive soccer in 2021 — she finished with 206 national-team caps — she sought answers to those questions in earnest. With help from Game Plan, the Canadian Olympic Committee's athlete wellness program, she began an MBA at Queen's University and met a fellow believer in Thomas Gilbert. One afternoon, the two retreated to a bar around the corner from her house in Toronto and pulled out a napkin and a pen.
'That napkin,' Matheson said, 'definitely led to some things.'
The pair made a list of the obvious needs for any new league: owners, sponsors, players, fans. Matheson worked to fill them. She called Greg Kerfoot, the co-owner of Major League Soccer's Vancouver Whitecaps. He came on board. The Calgary Foothills Soccer Club also agreed to field a team. Air Canada and CIBC joined as sponsors. The dream had a frame.
In December 2022, Matheson and Gilbert, with a boost from Sinclair, felt confident enough to make their plans public under the banner of Project 8 Sports, Inc. ('We literally waited our whole career for this moment,' Sinclair said.) They promised eight teams, playing from coast to coast by the spring of 2025. They managed to find six: Vancouver, Calgary, the Ottawa Rapid, AFC Toronto, the Montreal Roses, and the Halifax Tides.
The launch, they got right on time.
'There have been lots of days when something fell through, and it just felt like it wasn't going to happen,' Matheson said. 'In times like those, I absolutely pictured the opening games.'
Now Canadians, too, will finally see the end she's had for so long in mind.
♦ ♦ ♦
The vision for a Canadian league should never have been singular. Thirty-two countries competed at the 2023 Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Only two didn't have a professional domestic league for women: Canada and Haiti.
'We have to acknowledge the historical disadvantages that women and girls have faced, and there's still a legacy of that in our country,' said Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, said Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, the CEO of Canadian Women and Sport, an organization dedicated to increasing the presence of women in sports at all levels. 'The expectations that boys have for the experience they will get in sport should be shared by girls, too, in every part of the pathway.'
Globally, women's leagues began forming in the 1970s, after 110,000 fans filled Azteca to watch host Mexico play Denmark in an unofficial women's World Cup final in 1971. (The English Football Association lifted its ban on women for the event; it had been in place since 1921 after soccer was deemed 'quite unsuitable for females.')
Canada failed to form its own league at the time because 'there wasn't really the natural onramp,' Matheson said.
Some professional women's leagues were started at the behest of national associations, especially after the Women's World Cup began to assert itself as a major event. Other leagues in Europe and Mexico were offshoots of men's professional outfits. Where men played in front of crowds, women naturally did, too.
Canada Soccer, this country's sports governing body, never had the financial or organizational wherewithal to build its own league. It was saved by our relatively progressive culture when it comes to girls and women playing sports, which meant the national team was better than it should have been. In a strange way, its success made the need for a league less urgent.
'We've been punching above our weight,' Sandmeyer-Graves said.
And until the Canadian Premier League formed in 2017, there wasn't a men's domestic league to grow alongside.
They sell pucks at Parliament. They don't sell soccer balls.Diana Matheson
Today, entering its seventh season, the CPL is still finding its feet, never mind helping a parallel women's league find its own. The CPL's average attendance last season was a little less than 4,000; FC Edmonton, one of its founding franchises, folded in 2022. For many Canadians, soccer is for kids to play, not for adults to watch; hockey is how we occupy ourselves.
'They sell pucks at Parliament,' Matheson said. 'They don't sell soccer balls.'
She wasn't surprised, then, when she encountered resistance — none of it catastrophic, but every step forward exacted a toll. 'Diana met a lot of disbelievers,' NSL president Christina Litz said. 'She heard all the things that people who have been in the women's side of sports have heard for so many years.'
Negotiations with potential big-pocket owners like Toronto sports behemoth MLSE and Major League Soccer's CF Montreal fell through; club licences came a year later than expected, only weeks before the season opener; some teams scrambled to find venues and fill their rosters. Asked for the hardest day in her journey, Matheson struggled to come up with just one. 'It was probably some random Tuesday,' she said. 'We called them 'sky is falling' days.'
She remained undaunted. As a young midfielder, she had a reputation for seeing space where others did not. As a 41-year-old businesswoman, she can still spot opportunity in the void. The Northern Super League doesn't include 'women' or even 'soccer' in its name because of its grander ambitions, and hers. In Europe, the best men's leagues — the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 — have never felt the need to define or explain themselves.
Their reason for being is obvious. Their supremacy is, too.
♦ ♦ ♦
'By most measures — salaries, revenues, projected attendance — we'll come out of the gate as a top five league in the world,' Matheson said.
In the men's game, such a pledge would sound like lunacy. The standards are so high elsewhere, and the history so deep. The CPL is ranked by CONCACAF as the sixth-strongest league in North America, never mind the world, behind Guatemala's Liga Nacional. Opta Power Rankings rates Calgary's Cavalry, the defending cup champions, as the game's 1,403 rd -best men's side.
Because the women's game is less established, it's an easier market to enter and dominate, especially given Canada's deep player pool. Despite hockey's cultural dominance, soccer is the country's largest participation sport; Canada has the third-most girls and women playing the game in the world. 'We're able to compete right away,' Matheson said.
One of her most pivotal decisions was the league's salary structure: It took more than some jotted notes on a napkin to strike a balance between attracting top talent to a new and risky proposition and not bankrupting owners. In the end, teams will have a salary cap of $1.6 million (all figures Cdn) for a roster of 20 to 25 players; the league minimum salary is $50,000, or $2,000 for each of 25 regular-season games.
That minimum salary is the second highest for women's soccer in the world, after only the NWSL. It's also higher than the CPL's lowest bar of $30,000. (The CPL has a salary floor and ceiling for its clubs, with a cap of a little over $1.2 million and some exemptions for young players.) NSL contracts are guaranteed, and players can't be traded without their consent.
'We knew we wanted to build a league with certain professional standards,' Matheson said. 'What's a liveable salary in Canada? Shouldn't that be the baseline?"
To skeptics, that might seem an overly optimistic or even naïve approach; soccer is a game of fine margins, and women's soccer has proved a delicate business.
But the way Matheson has trained herself to see problems as openings, she recruited independent owners committed solely to growing the women's game. (She and Gilbert have a stake in the Rapid. Most of the other groups are led by women; Kerfoot has announced the sale of the Whitecaps, making the Rise his principal soccer holding.) She found six instead of her desired eight because she offered a binary proposition: total investment, or none.
'It comes down to the values you want to create,' Litz said. 'We're declaring to the rest of the world that doing this any other way is not right.'
♦ ♦ ♦
Every promise is also a potential liability, of course. Startups inevitably take losses: The league has told its owners to expect to invest $8 million to $10 million over the next five seasons. But devotion has its limits. At some point, the NSL's revenues will have to exceed its considerable expenditures, and there's no shortage of soccer leagues and clubs that have foundered on the rocks of financial reality. The NSL exists in large part because of Matheson's passion. It will continue to exist only if hundreds of thousands of fans come to share it.
'As a national team, we've always wanted to build a league in this country, and it's been honestly so sad that we haven't had one,' said Quinn, the national-team mainstay who signed with Vancouver in January after five seasons with the Seattle Reign. 'I think it's just such an incredible opportunity for young athletes to finally see themselves and what their futures can look like on the pitch.'
The first challenge to overcome is distance. The Professional Women's Hockey League also has six teams; strategically, however, the PWHL's longest single road trip is between Minnesota and Boston. The NSL is spread farther afield, and so thinner, facing the same hard math that's long frustrated touring musicians: Canada's miles-per-gig ratio is unkind.
We're building our audience from a very small number. We have to go where Canadians are.Diana Matheson
Litz, a Winnipegger who previously worked with the CFL and the NHL's Winnipeg Jets, knows well the struggles of building intimacy at a remove. 'It's all about connection to community,' she said. The league has secured broadcasting partnerships with the CBC, TSN, and RDS in Canada, as well as ESPN+ in the U.S., hoping even faraway fans will feel tied to their teams. 'We're building our audience from a very small number,' Matheson said. 'We have to go where Canadians are.'
Geography will remain a foe. When Halifax visits Vancouver on May 5, the Tides will complete one of the most daunting road swings in domestic soccer anywhere. The world's current longest is in the A-League, between Perth, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand. The CPL's well-named Wanderers claim third whenever they leave Halifax to visit Pacific FC on Vancouver Island, and vice-versa.
The Tides and Rise will take fourth.
Despite Canada's daunting space, the league faces a bigger, almost ironic challenge: There are not nearly enough places for women to play. 'Our biggest constraint is infrastructure,' Matheson said. Two of the league's six founding clubs, Ottawa and Calgary, will be second- or third-tier tenants in stadiums that are too big. Others, like Toronto and Montreal, will risk outgrowing their tiny outposts.
Goldilocks venues, with capacities between 8,000 and 18,000, are rare in Canada. In comparable countries like Japan or Australia, there's one for every 500,000 residents. In Canada, there's one for every eight million.
Outside Toronto, the same scarcity exists for quality indoor training facilities. When Iceland emerged as a surprise soccer power in 2016, despite having a winter-bound population of fewer than 400,000, an ambitious national building program won much of the credit. Communities across Canada will put up expensive hockey arenas without restraint. Any pasture becomes the soccer field, even though more kids will use it.
Now, in six cities across Canada, girls can go watch women play. That's the short-term. It's even more exciting to think about what things are going to look like five years, 10 years from now.Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, the CEO of Canadian Women and Sport
'Give me a couple of weeks, but we think there's a role for us there,' Matheson said. She'd like to meet her original goal of eight teams by 2027. The two expansion franchises will go to cities willing to make practical investments as well as emotional ones. They will go to communities that promise to put women's soccer first.
'Boys know that men's soccer matters,' Sandmeyer-Graves said. 'Girls don't get that message. Now, in six cities across Canada, girls can go watch women play. That's the short-term. It's even more exciting to think about what things are going to look like five years, ten years from now.'
The Halifax Tides have a slogan: Rise Together. It evokes images of boats lifted by the ocean. But if the NSL is truly to become part of the national sports landscape in Canada, its success won't be measured by the size of its fleet. It will be measured by the safety of its harbours.
♦ ♦ ♦
Already, Matheson has been surrounded by love. The London Olympics team that cried and celebrated together has answered her call again. Christine Sinclair is part of Vancouver's ownership group. Desiree Scott is suiting up for the Rapid. Erin McLeod came out of retirement to play for the Tides. The national team's triumphs made the NSL possible; the hope is that the favour will soon be returned.
'For the women's game in Canada, this is a huge step,' said Casey Stoney, the head coach of the women's national team. 'To professionalize the game and have professional teams is massive.'
'It's absolutely critical,' Kevin Blue, Canada Soccer's CEO, agreed. 'A thriving domestic professional league for women is essential to our sport.' His organization will grant $1 million to the NSL this season, the same commitment it's made to the CPL.
So far, the CPL has paid limited dividends to the men's national team. At last month's CONCACAF Nations League finals, defender Joel Waterman, the only player on the roster who could be considered a CPL product, didn't get off the bench.
That's partly a function of the CPL's weak position in the global soccer hierarchy; the NSL is setting its own stronger standards. Stoney included two NSL players, Vancouver's Samantha Chang and Toronto's Emma Regan, in her first squad selection for February's Pinatar Cup. She rostered three for this month's friendlies against Argentina, including Quinn.
The numbers should only grow. 'It does feel like a movement more than a moment,' Sandmeyer-Graves said. NSL teams can roster no more than eight internationals. This season, there will be 87 Canadian women getting paid to play, watched by however many Canadian girls imagining a different future for themselves. More will soon see glory in joining them.
'Going to market in 2025 was the priority,' Matheson said. Canada will co-host a men's World Cup in 2026; the next women's World Cup will take place in Brazil in 2027; the Canadian women, who won gold at the Tokyo Olympics, will try to win another in Los Angeles in 2028.
It's hard to pinpoint the starts of dreams. It's easier to know when it's time for them to come true.
♦ ♦ ♦
Back on that field in 2012, or even in that bar in 2022, Diana Matheson couldn't have foreseen another reason — maybe the biggest reason — her dreams have a chance of surviving.
In a different time, it might have made more sense for Canadian cities to bid for NWSL teams, the way Toronto will soon be home to the WNBA, tagging along rather than starting from scratch. But the usual perils of an international league, like player recruitment and the value of the dollar, pale next to the current state of play, when a president's whims can derail best-laid plans, and borders feel like tripwires.
Earlier this month, the Football Association of Zambia decided not to roster four NWSL players for a tournament in China, citing U.S. travel policy and fearing their being unable to return to their clubs.
Vanessa Gilles, Canada's reigning women's player of the year and currently on loan to Lyon from L.A.'s Angel City, suggested recently that she wouldn't return to the NWSL. 'I don't see myself going back to the United States with the current geopolitical situation,' she said in a French-language interview with Le Progrès OL. 'It's a bit complicated to go back there as a Canadian.'
We're choosing to invest here, at home. We're taking a big bet on Canada.Diana Matheson
For Quinn, the first openly transgender athlete to play in a FIFA World Cup, the calculus is even more fraught. For them, the Northern Super League must seem like a sanctuary. While the world is fracturing, the country is coming together to protect its own.
'It's not like anyone wants what's going on politically to be going on right now,' Matheson said. 'But we're starting to have conversations about investing in Canada in a way that I haven't seen. I love that we're having those conversations. Because from day one, we're choosing to invest here, at home. We're taking a big bet on Canada.'
There is more than one way to measure distance. While the NSL's inaugural class of players will travel thousands of kilometres over the course of their historic season, they won't once cross an international border. Eighty-seven Canadian women will now be at home even when they're on the road. The value of that to them, especially these divided days, is clear.
Now it's up to their fellow Canadians to decide: What's the value of that to us?
About the Author
Footer Links
My Account
Profile
CBC Gem
Newsletters
Connect with CBC
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Instagram
Mobile
RSS
Podcasts
Contact CBC
Submit Feedback
Help Centre
Audience Relations, CBC
P.O. Box 500 Station A
Toronto, ON
Canada, M5W 1E6
Toll-free (Canada only):
1-866-306-4636
TTY/Teletype writer:
1-866-220-6045
About CBC
Corporate Info
Sitemap
Reuse & Permission
Terms of Use
Privacy
Jobs
Our Unions
Independent Producers
Political Ads Registry
AdChoices
Services
Ombudsman
Public Appearances
Commercial Services
CBC Shop
Doing Business with Us
Renting Facilities
Accessibility
It is a priority for CBC to create a website that is accessible to all Canadians including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges.
Closed Captioning and Described Video is available for many CBC shows offered on CBC Gem.
About CBC Accessibility
Accessibility Feedback
© 2025 CBC/Radio-Canada. All rights reserved.
Visitez Radio-Canada.ca