What You Don’t Know Is Costing You: The Capacity Gap Draining Millions from CONCACAF Football

🕒 Reading time: 5 minutes · For executives, legal professionals, agents, and football governance stakeholders in the CONCACAF region

Jul 01, 2025

🧠 Soccer has a legal system. Canada and the Caribbean just aren’t part of it yet — not only because they don’t recognize it, but because they go out of their way to shut out the very voices trying to build it.

Despite producing elite players and hosting the next World Cup, Canada and much of the Caribbean remain institutionally disconnected from football’s global legal framework.

There’s no regulated legal pathway for football practitioners.
No access to FIFA’s mechanisms for dispute resolution or compliance.
And active resistance to independent legal expertise — including Pitchside Sports Consulting, the only football regulatory consultancy operating in the CONCACAF region, remains common practice.

This six-part series examines exactly how the capacity gap is blocking progress — legally, economically, and institutionally — while the rest of world football moves forward.

📉 A Global System, Ignored

Modern professional football does not run on instincts or opinions. It runs on regulation.

From player transfers to agent representation, from youth development incentives to disciplinary enforcement — the game is governed by a codified legal system designed to protect rights, ensure transparency, and distribute value fairly across the global ecosystem.

That system includes:

The FIFA Statutes
The Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP)
The FIFA Football Agent Regulations (FFAR)
The FIFA Disciplinary Code
The FIFA Clearing House Regulations
And jurisprudence known as ‘lex sportiva’ confirmed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS)

These instruments are not optional guidelines. They are binding, enforceable, and recognized across all 211 FIFA member associations — surpassing even the United Nations, which has 193 member states.

In Europe, Asia, and South America, this globally recognized legal framework, otherwise known as football law is embedded into the daily operations of clubs, leagues, federations, and national tribunals.
Legal professionals in those regions are trained with specialist education to navigate this system with ease. Clubs rely on it to enforce contracts. Players use it to resolve disputes. Agents depend on it to operate across jurisdictions.

⚠️ In CONCACAF, this same system is misunderstood, underutilized, and outright ignored.

There are no domestic regulations that mirror FIFA’s global standards.
There are no national panels qualified to apply them.
Consequently, there is no pipeline of domestic legal professionals trained in this niche area of law.

And because the framework isn’t applied, the benefits of participation — financial, legal, and competitive — remain out of reach.

This is the core failure:
The region isn’t excluded from football’s global economy because of its size or talent.
With a World Cup Winning bid, a population of over 44 million and the second-largest landmass on the planet, Canada has every structural, economic and cultural advantage imaginable.

What it lacks is football regulatory alignment.
This exclusion is self-inflicted — the result of refusing to integrate with the legal system that governs the global game.

🔎 What This Series Will Cover

Over the next five articles, we’ll demonstrate — through regionally relevant examples — how this capacity gap produces legal exposure, institutional breakdown, and financial exclusion at every level of the game.

1️⃣ No Lex Sportiva, No Justice: Jesse Marsch, CAS, and Canada’s Legal Blind Spot

When CONCACAF charged Jesse Marsch in June 2025, it did so without citing legal provisions, outlining procedural steps, or indicating a right of appeal — a clear breach of both the 2025 Gold Cup Regulations and the FIFA Disciplinary Code.

This wasn’t a clerical oversight. It was a procedural failure that exposed a deeper, more systemic issue:
Neither CONCACAF nor Canada Soccer demonstrated any understanding of football’s regulatory framework.

In any functional federation, the General Counsel of the concerned Member Association would have intervened — not only to challenge the process on legal grounds, but to publicly assert the procedural rights owed under FIFA’s disciplinary system.
Yet in this case, Canada Soccer remained silent.
No legal response falling within the public sphere. No statement. No procedural rebuttal. No signal that their legal leadership understood the mechanisms available through FIFA, CONCACAF, or the Court of arbitration for Sport.

Unfortunately, this silence has spoken volumes for many years.

How much longer of regression before it is understood in Canada? Football-related disputes require legal personnel trained in lex sportiva — the specialized body of law that governs player discipline, club sanctions, and general institutional accountability.
And yet, Canada Soccer’s top legal officer — tasked with safeguarding the federation’s position — continues to offer up no evidence of that expertise.

The problem isn’t just the absence of due process.
The problem is that no one in the room knew what due process should look like under FIFAs regulatory framework. Under International Football Law.

This same failure is mirrored in Canada’s broader legal infrastructure.
While CAS maintains a dedicated Football List to ensure arbitrators are qualified in FIFA regulatory matters, Canada’s dispute system — the SDRCC — does not even recognize football law as a defined legal field within Canada. Nor do they have the capacity to provide such a definition.
There are no adjudicators formally equipped to handle football specific diputes over training compensation, player contracts, or agent licensing compliant with FIFAs regulatory standards.

Until Canada and the Caribbean adopt and apply lex sportiva, players, clubs, and agents will remain locked out of the very system designed to protect and empower them — and entirely dependent on confederations and legal officers who are ill-prepared to defend their interests.

2️⃣ No Code, No Oversight, No Safety: SpyGate and the Collapse of Legal Safeguards in Canadian Soccer

The second issue in this series centres on one of the most revealing failures of institutional governance in Canadian football: the surveillance scandal of Bev Priestman, former head coach of the women’s national team, by senior figures within Canada Soccer.

This wasn’t just an internal conflict. It was a globally embarrassing incident that exposed what happens when an institution operates without a disciplinary code, oversight, or enforceable codes of conduct.

In any professionally governed football system, this kind of crisis would trigger a codified regulatory process, independent adjudication, and transparent procedural guarantees.

But Canada Soccer has none of these in any meaningful sense. While it technically maintains a disciplinary committee, its appointees lack demonstrable understanding of international football law, lex sportiva or FIFA’s regulatory framework. There is no credible enforcement mechanism recognized by the SDRCC, CCES or Court of Arbitration for Sport. No qualified internal judicial body. No enforceable code of conduct.

The silence of Canada Soccer’s previous General Counsel was equally telling. No legal response. No procedural clarification. No assertion of rights under FIFA’s disciplinary structure.

Importantly, this legal vacuum I am referring to has real consequences. In 2023, a House of Commons testimony exposed systemic failures to address sexual abuse allegations in Canadian soccer. In 2024, Vancouver Whitecaps players went as far as calling for former Canada Soccer president and current CONCACAF President, Victor Montagliani’s, suspension for mishandling sexual assault claims. Still, no formal legal response.

When governance operates without structure — and when Football Regulatory is treated as irrelevant — the rule of law becomes optional. And when the rule of law is optional, institutional legitimacy collapses. Bad Governance is not only cultivated — its celebrated.

SpyGate and the Sexual Assault Case against Canada Soccer isn’t just poor optics — it’s unequivocal evidence that Canada Soccer lacks the safeguards to resolve conflict, protect employees, or maintain public trust. Despite the federal government’s $16 million investment into the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC), there remains no functioning system of accountability. It isn’t just that no one followed the rules — it’s that no one knew which rules existed, or where to turn when they were broken.

3️⃣ Closed League Economics — CSB & the Illusion of Commercial Independence

The third issue in this series highlights a growing concern: Canada is replicating closed-league structures seen globally — but without the integration, alignment, or shared purpose that make them work elsewhere.

In the U.S. (SUM/MLS), Australia (W and A League/APL), and India (FSDL/ISL), so called independent commercial entities are structured to support all stakeholders — men’s and women’s leagues, national teams, and clubs — under a centralized commercial and governance umbrella. Revenues are centralized, risk and losses are shared, and collective stakeholder alignment drives national development.

Canada isn’t forging a different path — it’s mimicking global models while embracing them without fully understanding their commercial advantages. The result is a structure that looks aligned on the surface but lacks the regulatory coherence, accountability, and stakeholder integration required to succeed.

Canada Soccer Business (CSB) controls the men’s game and national teams. Meanwhile, the newly launched Northern Super League — Canada’s first professional women’s league — operates entirely independently, with no integration, no shared revenue model, and no articulated plan to align infrastructure or governance.

This isn’t innovation — it’s institutional negligence in slow motion, laying the groundwork for the next big governance failure in Canadian “Professional” Soccer.

Have we not learn from the Canadian Soccer League after all of these years?

Where global best practice promotes collaboration and financial solidarity, Canada has created competing silos, dividing sponsors, media access, and long-term sustainability.

Who absorbs the losses if one league struggles?
Where is the mechanism for domestic and regional reinvestment or redistribution?
What system ensures shared success across the football ecosystem?

Without integration, there is none.

Until Canada adopts a unified model — like those used in every other successful closed-league economy — the country’s football structure will remain underleveraged, short-sighted, and fundamentally unfit for professional growth.

4️⃣ Gold Cup Reflections: Infrastructure Without Law

Caribbean football is rich in raw talent, national pride, and growing regional ambition.
But it remains structurally underdeveloped — not because of passion, but because of the persistent absence of legal, regulatory, and institutional capacity.

Across the region, we see investments in pitches, tournaments, and federations.
But without:

⚖️ Club associations to coordinate development and representation
📄 Contractual stability systems grounded in FIFA regulatory standards
💸 Mechanisms to track and claim training compensation and solidarity payments

…these efforts become unsustainable.

Infrastructure without law isn’t development — it’s a vanity project.

The truth is this: you can’t scale what you can’t govern.
And in the absence of legal alignment, Caribbean clubs and federations in particular are locked out of the global football economy. They cannot access dispute resolution mechanisms, cannot protect their own players contractually, and cannot recover the value they produce when those players move abroad.

This is the capacity gap in its purest form — not a lack of talent, but a lack of legal integration.

No regional player can be fully protected.
No club can receive what it’s entitled to.
No federation can negotiate with equal footing.

Until the Caribbean also embraces football law as an essential part of its development architecture, the region will continue to produce brilliance on the pitch — but miss out on the structural gains off it.

And when those systems aren’t built now, the losses compound — in revenue, in retention, and in long-term sovereignty over regional football assets.

5️⃣ Canada Soccer’s Revolving Door

Canada Soccer has cycled through four presidents, multiple interim general secretaries, and is operating with mounting debt. This executive instability is directly tied to its refusal to embed football-specific legal strategy into leadership.

There is no continuity in commercial planning. No regulatory expertise. No institutional memory.

Meanwhile, the cost of running a national team program is rising — especially when most of our international players must be flown in from abroad. In a federation with no legal infrastructure and constant leadership turnover, where is that money coming from? Who is managing the risk?

Now consider this:

In 2017, CONCACAF President Victor Montagliani received over $2 million USD in compensation, including a $1.25 million base salary — more than both the FIFA and UEFA presidents earned that year, despite CONCACAF generating a fraction of the revenue.

This is not just about optics. It reflects a deeper disconnect between executive pay and institutional capacity.

FIFA and UEFA — with multibillion-dollar revenue cycles — operate with full legal departments, sport integrity frameworks, and global enforcement tools. CONCACAF, with annual income closer to $100 million in tournament years, offers none of that — and yet compensates its leadership at a premium.

This gap between earnings and output exemplifies the very dysfunction this series seeks to expose: unchecked leadership, absent legal accountability, and a football economy that rewards inertia over infrastructure.

Until Canada (and CONCACAF) rebuild their governance on foundations of legal expertise, regulatory compliance, and financial transparency, the region will remain stuck in cycles of short-term leadership and long-term underperformance.