Valour FC closing its doors

Say goodbye to professional soccer in Winnipeg.

After seven challenging seasons marked by poor attendance and limited on-field success, Valour FC revealed Friday that they are folding.

The Winnipeg Football Club, who also run the Blue Bombers, were losing around a million dollars a year to operate Valour. The Canadian Premier League stepped in and covered the bills with a loan for the past two seasons but were not willing to continue doing that moving forward.

“We had invested and had significant losses over those years. We’re at the point where we’re not comfortable any further because we have an obligation to the Winnipeg Football Club and Princess Auto Stadium,” WFC president and CEO Wade Miller told the Free Press on Friday.

“We’ve actively worked with the CPL for the last two or three years, a long time, to try to find a suitable tenant or somebody that would like to purchase a team and it just never came to fruition.”

For Miller, not enough fans were coming through the gates to justify the investment. Valour’s average attendance this season was 3,213 and that number got a boost from their school day match on June 4 when they gave away 11,000 tickets to students.

Valour beat Vancouver FC 3-1 that afternoon.

“We gave them all a coupon to come back to another game, with no restrictions, for June or July and we barely saw anybody come back,” said Miller.

“We just could not get the attendance where it needed to be.”

Miller also pointed to May 20 when Valour hosted the Vancouver Whitecaps of the MLS in the second leg of the Canadian Championship quarterfinals.

“We had invested and had significant losses over those years. We’re at the point where we’re not comfortable any further because we have an obligation to the Winnipeg Football Club and Princess Auto Stadium.”

Only 3,500 fans showed up to watch a 2-2 draw despite it being the first time an MLS side has ever played in Winnipeg.

With nearly 30,000 empty seats every time Valour stepped on the pitch, Princess Auto Stadium was obviously an awkward fit.

“I love all the Valour fans. Whether it’s our season ticket members, or the Red River Rising supporters’ group, we had passionate fans, we just never had enough of them,” said Miller.

“That was our challenge the whole way.”

Piling up wins proved to be an even bigger challenge. The organization started with a bang in the inaugural season opener when Winnipegger Dylan Carreiro scored in the 78th minute to lift Valour to a 2-1 road win over Pacific FC on May 1, 2019.

It was mostly all downhill from there.

Valour never qualified for the playoffs and is the only team outside of Vancouver FC — who joined the CPL in 2023 — to never finish in the top half of the table. Valour had just 50 wins in 175 league matches and were outscored 273-203. They also suffered several embarrassing beatdowns over the years such as an 8-0 shellacking courtesy of Cavalry FC (Sept. 2, 2019) and a pair of 5-0 losses against Forge FC in 2025.

Early in their existence, they relied heavily on local talent with names like Carreiro, Raphael Ohin (who remained with Valour for all seven seasons), Marco Bustos, Dylan Sacramento, Tyler Attardo, Ali Musse, Federico Pena and Tyson Farago.

When that didn’t elicit positive results, they brought in players with MLS experience like Andrew Jean-Baptiste and Brett Levis, welcomed MLS talent on loan with names like Jonathan Sirois and Sean Rea, and signed internationals with impressive backgrounds like Rafael Galhardo, Jose Galan and Kian Williams, but nothing clicked.

Not even a coaching change made a difference. Rob Gale was fired after two and a half seasons in charge and replaced with Phillip Dos Santos and both failed to build a contender.

When contacted by the Free Press on Friday, Ohin and Dos Santos declined to comment. Gale, as well as the CPL, did not respond by press deadline.

Valour went 7-16-5 (wins, losses, draws) this year to finish sixth out of eight teams.

“I’m not going to look backwards on where we made mistakes and what we had to do differently, but on the field, at the end of the day we couldn’t drive the attendance that we needed to,” said Miller.

“We just could not get the attendance where it needed to be.”

“The Winnipeg Football Club is built in a way to run ventures that are profitable or break even.”

Jeff Chute, a 44-year-old season-ticket holder since Year 1, had a feeling something was amiss. He hadn’t heard anything about tickets for 2026 even though all other CPL clubs had contacted their season ticket holders already.

“It’s crushing. My friend and I that have season tickets together, we wouldn’t have believed anybody if they told us back in 2019 that this would only go seven years and it would go as poorly as it did,” said Chute.

“I really don’t think the Winnipeg Football Club was prepared for what they were getting into. This is a startup league in a country where a national league has never worked. I think they needed to prepare themselves for some building. Like, we’re over 100 years behind the rest of the football playing world when it comes to professional football. You need time to build up that fan base, to build up in the community, and I just feel they didn’t know what they were in for.”

Valour will honour all contractual obligations towards all players and staff until the end of the calendar year. Players who were under contract with Valour for next season will automatically become free agents or return to their parent clubs. Fans with credits in their ticketing accounts will receive full refunds.

“Most clubs in the MLS lost money the first two decades of the MLS, and I don’t understand how they expected to at least break even in a startup league that has never, ever been successful,” said Chute.

“If you’re committed to the project, you don’t view it as losses, you view it as an investment into your future. They just viewed it as losses and needed a break-even business from the jump, and I just don’t understand how anyone thought that was possible.”

The CPL will remain an eight-team league in 2026 with the addition of expansion FC Supra du Québec.

winnipegfreepress.com/taylorallen