Lower Mainland received the Canadian Premier League soccer franchise, and Pacific FC owners added a second team to the portfolio

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Dean Shillington, Rob Friend and Josh Simpson are back where they started.

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When the Canadian Premier League announced their arrival to the world in 2018 by revealing their names, Lower Mainland was high on the list of expected locations. But it never materialized, and the group involving Shillington, Friend and Simpson founded Pacific FC, outside Victoria.

Now the same owning group, SixFive Sports & Entertainment, will seek a spot for its second team at a still undetermined location on the Lower Mainland, following Wednesday’s announcement that the CPL will have a new team in the region starting play in 2023. .

“We feel great,” said Vancouver-based Shillington. “Obviously. It’s been a long, very long journey. We’ve been working on this for almost five years. So to have it now at the point where we can hand it over to everyone to help us pick a municipality and get a stadium, we’re very happy.

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“The Pacific opportunity worked very well with our partners in Langford, and now is the time to bring the game to Vancouver.”

There is no firm decision on where the team will be based, but Shillington and the CPL headquarters are not concerned about going head-to-head with Major League Soccer’s Vancouver Whitecaps – the team, by the way, won the Canadian Championship in August.

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The biggest driver of the team’s destiny is not a move-in-ready stadium, but the location and township. Pacific plays at Starlight Stadium in Langford, three minutes from the $ 7 million training facility built for the club. The Island Training Center, the largest of its kind in BC, It has three soccer fields, a sports hard court and a basketball court . The team owns the building, but it is on land leased from the City of Langford.

“With any type of investment like the one we are making, it is important to have an open and sustainable relationship with the municipality,” Shillington said. “We are going to invest heavily in infrastructure for men and women, that’s the focus, but we need someone who can help support us by opening locations that could be a bit more challenging in the real estate market like Vancouver.

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“We need to place it close to the access to SkyTrain, where people can access the games quite easily and safely and make it a great experience for families. That is the problem with many Canadian cities, is that the infrastructure does not exist today. With modular stadium technologies, we are very focused on building a dedicated infrastructure for specific sports and multisports.

“It’s a different experience when it’s a smaller, sold-out venue … it’s more interactive,” he said, pointing at Starlight. “That is the issue of how we are developing. We need to build that facility in Vancouver because it doesn’t exist today. “

The CPL had a single successful season under its belt when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down sports globally, and while league owners were prepared to take on financial losses as a start, facing a year with no incoming revenue could have been too much difficulty for many. But the league held out, holding a bubble tournament in Charlottetown, PEI, called The Island Games, and was back at its best this year.

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A share-centric ownership structure, rather than a franchise-based system like most North American sports, allowed the CPL to navigate the choppy waters of the financial pandemic.

“Resilience … and adaptability and the ability to keep going,” said league commissioner David Clanachan of the league resisting the pressures.

“People get a little tired of flashes in the pan. So we are very, very happy, “he said.

“It’s really great for BC football. And to be the kind of soccer factory (that it used to be), you need a home where the players can go. It just creates more opportunities at the top of the pyramid … rekindle the flame in many young people, both men and women, to take it to the next level. “

The CPL has gone from being a quirky conceptual exercise to an exploratory destination for European clubs. Several big-name European clubs have expressed interest in joining, and Atlético de Madrid established Atlético Ottawa to compete in the CPL in 2020.

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But not everything has been rosy with the league. Concerns about financial opacity, low player salaries, and a years-long effort to voluntarily acknowledge the Canadian Soccer Association Players – a union ratified by CPL players – have persecuted the league.

The very structure that helped the league survive has also come under fire, with payouts driven by the pandemic without any player or owner consulting. PFACan expressed concern about how the Ottawa list was constructed in a tweet on Wednesday, and expects more transparency this time.

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FC Edmonton has had trouble attracting fans, and players and their agents are raising questions about their operating finances.

But in Vancouver, there is enthusiasm for a new team to support, one that will likely be much closer to the bulk of the region’s population.

“For the CPL three years from now, and two of those years under a pandemic, the most important thing we need is infrastructure and investment in gambling in Canada. That’s what the SixFive group is all about, ”said Shillington, whose partners Friend and Simpson played professionally in Europe.

“We consider investment in Canadian soccer to be important and necessary, and we are strong supporters. We just need more jobs for the children and we need a path. We have been there for three years and this will be the continuation of that work. “

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