Gale wants to build lasting franchise

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This article was published 15/02/2019 (2495 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new team in a new league in a country that isn’t traditionally known for soccer.

Who the heck would want to be a part of that?

Everybody, apparently.

The Canadian Premier League is less than two months from kicking off its inaugural season, and all seven clubs across the country are busy building their rosters.

Winnipeg-based Valour FC head coach and general manager Rob Gale said despite the lack of history, there’s been no trouble convincing talent to take the plunge and sign with the Great White North’s newest soccer league. In fact, it’s almost a full-time job just keeping up with all of the emails he’s received from interested agents and players from around the globe.

“Absolutely non-stop. (Players from) every continent, pretty much every FIFA football nation I would say, if I went through my files here,” Gale said in an interview with the Free Press.

“It’s every day. I pick up my phone and I’m usually up and at it sort of by 6:30 in the morning, and Europe has been contacting me since 2:30 a.m. Then, you go to bed at night and New Zealand, Asia and all of those are waking up. It’s all day, every day, and it will be until the league kicks a ball. And it has been since the league was announced.

“Even people were reaching out before I was appointed to the club. They were sending resumés, and not just to myself — any name they could find on the website. The league gets them, any name they can find on our team’s website, Michelle (Lissel, Valour’s manager of public relations) gets hundreds a day.”

It’s an overwhelming process, to say the least. You walk into Gale’s office at Investors Group Field and it looks like he just moved in, despite landing the job in the summer. Other than a whiteboard, a flat-screen TV and some basic office furniture, the room is relatively empty. But then you look at his desk and see four papers filled with things he needs to do, and you immediately know why there hasn’t been much time to focus on decorating the place.

Gale has been doing a lot of travelling — including a 10-day trip to England, where he visited the Premier League’s Manchester United, Chelsea, and Fulham F.C. — and in between all the plane rides, phone calls and emails, he’s signed 12 players for the upcoming season. Each team is required to have 20 players by the league’s April 15 deadline, with only seven roster spots open to international talent. It’s been a whirlwind, but Gale had a strategy going in and he’s sticking to it.

“The main key was to see what local players would be of the calibre to be full-time professionals, or have been in Winnipeg, but are now playing professional football and which of those would we get back,” said Gale, the former head coach of Canada’s U20 men’s national team. “Then we’d expand into that national market that I knew very well. And then, you go and open the door internationally to the seven international spots. So, we’ve targeted all the way through in those sort of three brackets.”

You can’t argue Gale hasn’t successfully tackled the bracket of local players, as the club already has four under contract: midfielders Dylan Sacramento and Dylan Carreiro, forward Tyler Attardo and goalkeeper Tyson Farago. They’ve also signed Ghanaian midfielder Raphael Ohin, who’s played three seasons with WSA Winnipeg of the Premier Development League and now lives in the city.

“When you’ve got no history, you need players who have history with your city, your community, and with me, ideally, who can buy in,” said Gale, a Zambian-born English native who’s lived in the province for more than a decade.

“So, we started there. Then you start filling out positions — who would be good foils for that in terms of the style of play, the system of play, the brand of football, the philosophy and the culture we’re trying to build. Knowing the player’s character and intelligence is just as important to us. Will they fit what we’re trying to create here?”

As for recruiting international talent, it goes beyond watching players’ highlight videos on YouTube and reading scouting reports online. To get a good feel for a player and to make sure they’ll fit in with the club, Gale said he has to see them live. After all, you only get one shot at putting together a team for its inaugural campaign.

“It’s not about trying to build a team, it’s about building a football club,” Gale said.

“And that’s the most important thing to me. I might be the custodian for a short amount of time here as far as coaching goes. But the values, the brand, the philosophy, the culture — we want that to stand the test of time. It’s very important to start off on the right foot.”

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31