Montreal soccer gets facelift

Professional soccer in Montreal looks set to get a facelift in the next few years, with the Montreal Impact fighting for participation in the inaugural CONCACAF Champions League and a potential Major League Soccer franchise in the works.
The announcement of the qualification format for the inaugural Champions League in North America was made last Wednesday at a press conference in Toronto, which included the owners of the Impact, the Vancouver Whitecaps, and Canada’s lone MLS team, Toronto FC.
Montreal and Vancouver, who both currently play in the second-tier United Soccer League, will have a chance to qualify for the club competition by playing a six-game, three-team series against Toronto FC. The series’ victor will go on to represent Canada’s entry into the CONCACAF Champions League.
The Champions League itself will begin in August 2008 and will run until a champion is declared in April 2009. The format is set to include four teams from Mexico and the United States, as well as three Caribbean sides, two clubs each from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama; and one representative coming from Belize, Nicaragua and Canada.
The format will follow that used by the UEFA Champions League, with 24 teams divided into group stages before progressing to the knockout phase that will be determined by aggregate. The winner of the CONCACAF Champions League will also qualify to represent CONCACAF at the FIFA Club World Cup.
Both Vancouver and Montreal hope to ascend to the MLS, North America’s top soccer league, however they will have to wait until at least 2010, as the league has guaranteed Canadian exclusivity to Toronto up to that year. Last Saturday the league began its 13th season with the addition of a new expansion franchise in San Jose. MLS will also look to add teams in the next two years in Seattle and Philadelphia before another team north of the border is to be considered.
In Montreal the bid for an MLS franchise will be headed by Impact owner Joey Saputo and Montreal Canadiens owner George Gillette, who also owns a major stake in the prestigious English soccer club Liverpool FC. While Saputo has confirmed that he is in discussion with the Gillette Entertainment Group and Major League Soccer to bring an MLS franchise to Montreal, he could not provide further details. Saputo has previously expressed an interest in joining the MLS, though he has cited concerns over the team management structure as well as the shared revenue and player contracts that are controlled and negotiated by the league.
However, the MLS’s commissioner Don Gerber has pointed out that the league is currently evaluating Montreal as a potential market and that MLS is aiming to have 18 teams in the league by the year 2018.