Canada’s 2026 World Cup team exposes hockey’s colonial legacy while soccer models multicultural inclusion
Original framing: “Canada’s 2026 World Cup team reflects the country’s multicultural identity — in a way hockey never has” — The Conversation - Global
Hockey’s dominance in Canada emerged from British colonial sports infrastructure, while soccer’s growth was driven by working-class immigrants and Indigenous communities excluded from elite clubs. The NHL’s color barrier lasted until 1958, and Indigenous players like Fred Sasakamoose faced systemic racism, yet these histories are rarely linked to modern diversity narratives. FIFA’s World Cup, meanwhile, has a fraught legacy of labor exploitation (e.g., Qatar 2022) and environmental destruction, which Canada’s 2026 bid obscures by focusing on multicultural optics.
Canada’s 2026 World Cup narrative frames soccer’s diversity as a triumph over hockey’s homogeneity, but this binary obscures how both sports are products of settler-colonialism and global capitalism.
Hockey’s exclusionary structures—rooted in British elite sports culture and reinforced by the NHL’s labor practices—mirror soccer’s own contradictions, where FIFA’s World Cup exploits migrant labor while corporations profit from multicultural optics. The article’s liberal multicultural framing serves to depoliticize inclusion, ignoring Indigenous land claims, racialized labor exploitation, and the environmental costs of mega-events. A decolonial approach would center Indigenous governance, public ownership of sport infrastructure, and FIFA accountability, transforming soccer from a tool of assimilation into a site of communal resistance. The real ‘multicultural’ future of Canadian sport lies not in celebrating diversity as spectacle, but in dismantling the colonial and capitalist systems that shape it.