Oakville’s Matheson leading plan to kick off Canadian women’s pro league in 2025
Published December 6, 2022 at 4:20 pm
Diana Matheson helped Canada take home an Olympic bronze medal in women’s soccer and now the Oakville native is looking to bring a professional women’s soccer league to her home country.
The former Canadian women’s national team midfielder, business partner Thomas Gilbert and 2012 Olympic teammate Christine Sinclair are teaming up to launch a domestic professional women’s league in 2025.
Plans for the still unnamed league, which would be under the banner of Matheson’s Project 8 Sports Inc., would see eight teams take the field across the country with play to begin in April of 2025.
“Canadian professional women’s soccer league is well underway,” Matheson, CEO of Project 8, said in a statement. “Much work has gone on behind the scenes to get to today.”
Since the 2012 medal performance in London, the national women’s team has gone on to win a bronze medal in Rio in 2016 and then went on to its first gold medal performance at the 2020 Tokyo Games.
Sinclair believed the success at the 2012 Olympic Games, which ended a 108-year-old medal drought, would help create a professional women’s league at home that Canadian women use to develop their game, but it never happened.
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We are here to change the course of Canadian women sport.
Proud to be partnered with two incredible brands that believe in our path @AirCanada @cibc #ambitionsrise #flytheflag #itstime #canadianhistory pic.twitter.com/UPmXSmZ3pp
— Project 8 (@Project8Sports) December 6, 2022
Now Matheson, who retired in July of 2021, and Sinclair are taking it upon themselves to ensure it does.
“It’s important that women are building the league, Sinclair told the Canadian Press. “We are committed to developing something that is built differently, for women by women.
“We want to change the soccer landscape in Canada so women’s players can develop and play professionally here at home instead of having to go abroad, as every one of our national team players must do now to be successful.”
The Vancouver Whitecaps announced Monday that club will be home to one of the two founding teams in the eight-team league. The Calgary Foothills Soccer Club is the other.
The other six teams are expected to be named in 2023.
The league will feature two four-team conferences with at least one Canadian international player suiting up for each team. The league championship would be played sometime in the fall.
Matheson, 38, already has Air Canada and CIBC on board as sponsors.
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