Chris Corrigan is no Ryan Reynolds.
Yes, both men have strong Metro Vancouver ties and co-own soccer teams sending players to the upcoming FIFA World Cup.
But nobody is likely to pay Corrigan, a policy specialist who sings Renaissance choral music in his spare time, lavish sums to lead their movie franchise or endorse their gin brand.
Corrigan might have one leg-up on Reynolds, though. Although Wrexham AFC, which Reynolds has co-owned with fellow Hollywood star Rob Mac, has only recently begun producing top-level talent, the feat is almost becoming old hat for Corrigan’s TSS Rovers, a small Burnaby semi-pro club just one step above Canada’s countless amateur leagues.
In less than 10 years, the tiny club has helped bolster the careers of not only Julia Grosso and Jordyn Huitema, who won gold for Canada at the Tokyo Olympics, but also Joel Waterman, who will suit up for his second FIFA World Cup campaign this month.
TSS Rovers has become a key cog in Canada’s soccer pipeline while being owned not by multimillionaires, but by hundreds of local supporters just like Corrigan.
The reality of it all remains “absurd” to Corrigan, who has supported the Rovers since the club first kicked a ball in 2017.
“We wanted to give a pathway to Canadian players, especially in B.C., to make it to the national team and maybe one day play in a World Cup,” he says. “We had no idea it would be this fast.”
TSS Rovers is a small club created to help further the careers of aspiring young soccer players.
Photo by Tom Ewasiuk, courtesy of AFTN.
‘I got crazy’
Corrigan's Rovers are an outlier in Canadian soccer. Unlike the Vancouver-area pro teams that play in Major League Soccer, the Canadian Premier League or the Northern Super League, the semi-pro club is owned by its fans.
Corrigan is one of more than 450 supporter-owners to have poured their money — at least $265 a share — into the club. In return, each supporter gets a say in how the team is run, along with a season ticket to its men’s and women’s games at Swangard Stadium. Over the years, supporters have gotten a front-row seat to the early career stages of World Cup-bound players like Grosso, Huitema and Waterman.
The model — which is relatively common in Europe but almost unheard of in North America — is about “bringing the community together,” says Colin Elmes, the club’s sporting and technical director.
Elmes is a former University of British Columbia midfielder who founded TSS as a private soccer academy in Richmond in 1997. At the time, the business model was a bit “like piano lessons,” he says. Elmes would run teenage and preteen players through skill-development drills in a setting where they could “come and not worry about the scores of games, and the pressure, and just get better technically.” The arrangement was popular, Elmes says, but it did little to address the gap in professional pathways he saw for young soccer players in B.C.
“There was a void of proper football [opportunities] at that 18-to-21-year-old level,” he adds.
Outside of Major League Soccer’s Whitecaps and its academy system, aspiring players were left with few options for going pro. The Rise, a women’s club that now plays in Canada’s newly created Northern Super League, did not yet exist. Nor did Pacific FC and Vancouver FC, which were both founded later, in part, to tackle the same problem, and which now play in the Canadian Premier League.
Against his better financial judgment, Elmes bought the rights to a team in a U.S. semi-pro league in 2016. He spent just shy of $50,000 on the deal.
“I got crazy,” he jokes.
Together with his business partners, Will Cromack and Brendan Quarry, he set about assembling a collection of current and ex-college men’s and women’s players from across the province. TSS Rovers was born a year later.
Corrigan still fondly remembers the first match.
“We had a truck with a tailgate — that’s all,” he says. “We didn’t have a barbecue, we didn’t have food, we didn’t have anything else. It wasn't really a party until Joel [Waterman]’s family showed up with a bunch of veggie platters and snacks.”
The opposing team’s supporters, travelling from Oregon, smuggled two flats of beer across the Canada-U.S. border to add to the spread.
From the beginning, the Rovers attracted a different crowd. Instead of billing themselves as a rival to their crosstown competitors in the Whitecaps, with their US$8-million roster and BC Place pitch, they skewed local. Players helped set up the stands for their supporters before their games.
“I think they benefited by starting [when they did],” says longtime Vancouver-area soccer commentator Michael McColl, who has covered the sport in B.C. from the university level to the international game since 2009. At the time, the Whitecaps were struggling, and the Major League Soccer club was embroiled in a sexual assault scandal involving former women’s coach Bob Birarda .
“Supporters were kind of fed up with the Whitecaps and looking for som…
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