O Canada! What’s Going On?

The bright new future I predicted for Canadian soccer not so long ago has hit a bump in the road. Fred Nykamp was named as the new Chief Exec of the Canadian Soccer Association, the plan being for him to duplicate the job he did at Canada basketball and get all the countries various regional associations on the same page. Unfortunately, the CSA themselves weren’t all on the same page and now Nykamp is suing them for “wrongful firing and hiring.”

So he’s not just suing them over his dismissal, but for giving him the job in the first place, which suggests the CSA have got this whole thing wrong from start to finish.

Nykamp was hired in May, but due to start on August 1st. According to him, the CSA began changing his job description in July, and then told him not to show up for his first day of work. Then he was told that the executive committee that hired him didn’t have the authority to do so, and required the authorization of the full board. The full board took a vote on August 26 and decided against OKing the deal that Nykamp thought he’d already agreed to. Make sense? Of course not, and that’s why Nykamp is heading for the courts.

Nykamp says the process is “symptomatic of a serious dysfunction at the board level of the CSA that is also demonstrated by the performance of our national teams, state of the development system and other controversies which have been reported in the media.”

Which is just an erudite way of saying the CSA is a bureaucratic nightmare. Can any of The Offside’s Canadian friends shed any light on exactly what’s going on?

Category: World Football

Tags: Canada Fred Nykamp, World Football, World Soccer

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