CF Montréal: Harnessing the city’s vibrant soccer culture(s) | OneFootball

By Charles Boehm

Walk inside Centre Nutrilait, a century-old edifice tucked between Rue Notre-Dame and the St. Lawrence River which was once a firehouse but now serves as CF Montréal’s training facility, and you’ll see a motto splashed across the wall in large font, atop imagery of 1642 MTL and the rest of the club’s rowdy supporters’ groups at Stade Saputo.

‘Unis par nos différences.’ United by our differences.

It’s one of CFMTL’s slogans, reflective of their region’s burgeoning diversity and their desire to reflect it both on and off the field.

According to 2021 census data, about a quarter of the Montréal metropolitan area’s population – more than a million people –is foreign-born; the proportion is even higher in the city proper. Some 58 percent speak both French and English, and 21 percent speak three languages or more, with many newcomers drawn not just to the city’s economic dynamism but also Quebec’s Francophone character.

Haiti, Algeria and France are the leading places of origin among immigrants, though Morocco, China, Italy and India are also well represented, and Canada’s openness to refugees has drawn a substantial number of Syrians fleeing that nation’s brutal civil war. A 2022 survey found that 87 percent of Quebecers agree that “other cultures have a lot to offer us and their influences enrich us,” a welcoming attitude epitomized by Montréal’s cosmopolitanism.

All this lives right at the heart of an academy that’s now central to the club’s chosen ethos of player development.

“We have a bunch of different cultures at the club, in the city, and I think that's the beauty,” veteran CFMTL central midfielder and local boy Sam Piette told MLSsoccer.com last week. “You can have a team at the youth level, the U10, U12, that can have two, three Portuguese, two, three Italians, 10 people from Montréal that are pure Quebecois and some from Haiti.

“There's the Anglophone, there's the Francophone. I would say it's a special place, maybe the most special place in Canada, because you have all these different things that make us one.”

Strikingly, in an area where hockey has long been enshrined as a civic religion and the NHL’s Montréal Canadiens its high priests, soccer is now the most popular youth sport, powered in no small part by its global appeal among those new arrivals.

“We have a lot of cultures here in Quebec that are coming from soccer nations and soccer backgrounds, and the first thing all families will do is find where's the local soccer club, and register,” explained Marinos Papageorgopoulos, CFMTL’s academy director – himself a local product, who in typical Montréal fashion grew up speaking French in school, English with his friends and Greek at home with his family.

“Culturally, at the academy, you may have a player that has five brothers, one mother, no father, basically raising themselves, to a player that's from a very rich area that has access to everything they need growing up. And these guys are sitting next to each other on the bus – and that really is the range, and everything in between.

"But then all is equal here. Once we get on the field, all is equal.”

Collective mindset

The region’s soccer landscape has evolved amid Quebec’s long, snowy winters, with futsal widespread and many artificial-turf fields enclosed in inflatable domes during the cold months. Combining that aforementioned collective soccer IQ with a sturdy coaching infrastructure and long hours on hard courts has fostered an assertive, technical style.

“We want to have the ball. We want to have courage on the field, to play – at home or away, it’s not different for us,” said Maxime Leconte, a former member of the Canadian national futsal team who joined CFMTL’s first-team coaching staff earlier this year after several years on the academy staff. “We want to play the style of Montréal and the style of the academy, and I think it's the good way for the players.

“We won? Perfect. We lost? It's OK. But do you have a good reflection after the game, too? It's not just to play – for me, it's to have players to understand the game.”

The need for indoor spaces for such long periods of the year also helps clubs connect with immigrant communities who might otherwise be playing the game outside of established organizations. Piette pointed to the example of Mo Farsi, a Montréal native currently starring for the Columbus Crew – where head coach Wilfried Nancy is another notable product of the MTL scene – and the Algerian national team as an attacking-minded wingback.

“He was on the futsal national team, and you can see he's a very technical player, very comfortable on the ball,” said Piette. “Because yes, in the summer and when it's nice outside, you go out and play with your friends, but when it's cold and you don't really have a place, it's either you go under a bubble or in some gym, where the floor is pretty hard and you have to adapt.

“Kids, maybe when they want to organize a certain game, they can't really rent the full pitch, so they just rent a small one, but then there end up being 30 players showing up to split the fee. So you end up playing 15 against 15,” he added with a grin. “So tighter space, and this is where, yeah, you can develop different skills and abilities, for sure.”

Local representation

CFMTL have signed more than two dozen homegrown players since joining MLS in 2012. Yet that process has shifted into another gear in recent years, as the Bleu-blanc-noir centered their identity around nurturing and elevating talent – not just via the academy, but also with late bloomers and undervalued assets found elsewhere – in several cases selling on those players for handsome profits.

“For us, it's clearly a pillar of what we want to do: develop young players and then eventually either have them play with our team, or if the opportunity is right, maybe for them to be sold on,” said Simone Saputo, CFMTL’s managing director of academy strategy and roster management and son of club owner Joey Saputo, in a one-on-one interview with MLSsoccer.com.

“It's not the only part, right? We're a club that wants to win, but from the youth level, it's something that we value. We want our team to be made up of guys from our academy. We want Montréalers and Quebecers to be represented in our squad.”

Piette & Co. share Centre Nutrilait with the club’s youth sides, and he describes how senior players often lift weights alongside their teenage counterparts or watch their training sessions and scrimmages. It’s common for academy kids or even entire squads to be invited to join first-team practices, helping rising youngsters see that a pipeline exists for them to reach that level, if they make the grade.

“We can work as hard as we want, if there's no clear pathway to the first team that players can see and feel and touch, then it makes it really difficult for us to sell our product to the families and to the players,” said Papageorgopoulos.

His staff tracks and evaluates hundreds of players across Quebec and beyond, starting at the U-12 level, and offers homestay options to prospects from more distant locales. Simone Saputo also emphasizes that the club works to help academy players who don’t attain first-team contracts find professional opportunities elsewhere or win scholarships to US or Canadian university programs.

National team pipeline

Toronto’s sprawling suburbs have long been hailed as Canada’s engine of soccer talent. Products of places like Brampton and Mississauga can be found in numbers across MLS, the Canadian Premier League and various leagues overseas. Yet that center of gravity may gradually be shifting eastward.

One need only look to the current midfield of the Canadian men’s national team, where Montréalers Ismaël Koné, Nathan Saliba and Mathieu Choinière, whose transfer to clubs in England, Belgium and Switzerland reaped fees north of US$15 million combined for CFMTL, are key regulars for Jesse Marsch.

The latter two climbed every rung in the club’s developmental pathway, almost all of which did not exist when Piette, who’s now 30, was coming of age. Koné walked his own unique road, having left for Europe as a teenager before returning to his hometown when the COVID-19 pandemic closed doors across the Atlantic.

“For me, it's a big pride, because coming from Montréal and Quebec, the players, there's a lot of others that didn’t get their chances,” Koné said during the CanMNT’s September camp in Romania and Wales. “I always say in the city of Montréal, those guys are older than me, unfortunately, through the system, they couldn't get the chance, or there wasn’t a line for them to be as successful, so every time I'm out there, and just for the fact I was able to get a professional contract coming from Montréal is huge for me. I speak about it highly whenever I'm in Europe.

“Also, there's a lot of kids that I know in Montréal, or even just in Quebec, that just look up to the national team and what we did, whether it was in 2022 [at the World Cup] or what we're doing right now or Copa América [2024], that want to be a part of a team like this. So I know it's great for them, it's a big inspiration.”

Further down the team’s spine, former Colorado Rapids defender Moïse Bombito is a defensive mainstay and Portland Timbers goalkeeper Maxime Crépeau, another CFMTL academy alum, is neck and neck with Dayne St. Clair for the CanMNT’s starting job. Many others in the player pool are natives or spent significant chunks of their soccer journey in and around the city.

“Quebec is changing, and it's represented in the sports people play,” said Jean-François Téotonio, a journalist who covers CF Montréal for local French-language outlet La Presse. “So there's less and less Quebec players in hockey – that's just a fact – and there's more and more soccer players, then basketball players too. … Quebec is going to grow into a powerhouse of development of soccer.

“They cannot just ignore the good players that are coming out of Quebec now. Moïse Bombito, Ismaël Koné, those are the big names that, maybe in the mainstream media in Quebec, they're known, but not as much as, like, a Habs [Canadiens] player,” he continued. “But if you go to a grassroots field like the one in front of me right now, they’re household names, these guys, and that's because they are played by Jesse Marsch in the highest stages.”

Soccer renaissance

The CanMNT boss began his own head coaching career at Montréal, leading what was then known as the Impact in their inaugural MLS season. Since taking over the national team last year, he’s spearheaded a conscious pivot towards a region which has felt overlooked in the past by a Canadian soccer establishment sometimes perceived to be overly Anglocentric.

Marsch held a training camp in Montréal last autumn, which included an open training session and CanMNT players visiting local youth clubs. Next month, Canada will play Australia in a friendly at Stade Saputo, and the program has selected the city as its base for Les Rouges’ final preparations before the start of next summer’s World Cup on home soil, including their send-off match in June.

“Seeing the passion for the sport, the multiculturalism of what Montréal is, I think it does provide a breeding ground for the possibility of what we can develop,” Marsch, who marvels at his adopted nation’s ‘cultural mosaic,’ said last year. “We want to make a real strong connection in the community in Montréal, and with CF Montréal.

“We know that given all of the cultural diversity that Montréal represents, that there's a big opportunity to continue to build the sport there and to reap the rewards of what the community has to provide.”

Continuing the Montréal way

This wider soccer renaissance presents both opportunity and challenge for CFMTL. The Bleu-blanc-noir have struggled to produce first-team results on par with their transfer successes, missing out on the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs in five of the last eight seasons. Currently at the foot of the Eastern Conference standings, they've already been eliminated from this year’s postseason race, too.

In July, the club’s leadership posted an open letter to fans acknowledging that “we have not met the standards we set for ourselves, nor those you have a right to expect,” and pledging “to build a winning team that we can all be proud of.” For many observers, that includes adding more established players to help the prospects win, and perhaps a bit more managerial stability given CFMTL’s run of five head coaches over the past five years.

Yet the youth movement will remain at the heart of their efforts. Youth internationals Owen Graham-Roache and Aleksandr Guboglo signed homegrown deals earlier this year and headline the club’s rising crop of academy talent, though their coaches insist they won’t rush things.

That’s not the Montréal way.

“In football now, we want to have results very quickly,” said Leconte, pointing to the example of late-blooming French superstar Franck Ribéry. “I think in development, we wait. We need to wait [until] the good moments, to take time, because every player is different … Yes, Alex and Owen are ready to sign a contract, but not ready to play every game, every minute on the first team.

"So every player has a different pathway.”