A look at Manitoba’s best soccer teams

Winnipeg

Over the next five-plus weeks, the FIFA World Cup will be front and centre in the sports world. Forty-eight teams will play 104 matches in the international competition being played in Canada, USA and Mexico. For most of the world, it’s a football championship. For North Americans, the sport is soccer.

In this week’s column, let’s first deal with the terminology for the world’s most popular sport. Both terms are correct with soccer first used in Great Britain as a shortening for association football. Rugby football was called rugger. In the United States, a sport called gridiron football combined elements from association football and rugby. That’s the sport Americans and Canadians now call football. When a Winnipeg team won its first Grey Cup in 1935, the team now called the Blue Bombers was officially the Winnipeg Rugby Football Club.

Now seems to be an appropriate time for Memories of Sport to remember our province’s best soccer teams. In 1999, the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame inducted its first soccer team, the 1954 Army Navy Air Force Scottish. The ANAF squad won the provincial title by beating United Weston and Germania, then defeated Port Arthur United and Hamilton British Imperials to reach the national championship. In the best-of-three series against Vancouver North Shore United, Scottish won the first game 3-2. In the second match, 22-year-old keeper Walter Norget led Scottish to a 3-0 victory. Centre Jimmy Pines and centre-half George James, who had played in the First Division in Scotland, were the leaders of the eleven.

In 2004, when the HOF held its first special veterans induction, five teams from the past were recognized. In 1913, the Norwood Wanderers Football Club from St. Boniface won the first Dominion of Canada (national) championship beating teams from Montreal, Toronto, and Fort William. The Wanderers repeated the next season in the four-team Challenge Cup tournament. In 1915, Winnipeg Scottish beat the eastern rep Toronto Lancashire to bring the title to our province for the third straight year. The teams first played to a 0-0 draw before Scottish won the second match 6-1. George Mair and Charles Forsyth both scored twice and William Corrie and Jock Anderson added singles.

In 1924, United Weston became the fourth Manitoba team to capture the Dominion crown and in 1926 matched the 1924 club as the senior soccer champions of Canada. When United Weston celebrated its 70th anniversary in 1979, the Winnipeg team was recognized as Canada’s oldest soccer team.

Other teams honoured by the HOF were the 1992 Winnipeg Fury in 2008, the 1970 Manitoba Selects in 2013, the 1962 ANAF Scottish in 2016, and the 1987 Lucania Football Club in 2025. The Fury was a professional team that captured the Canadian Soccer League championship. In national championship finals played in Winnipeg, the Manitoba Selects provincial all-star team beat Quebec 2-1, Scottish defeated Edmonton Edelweiss 6-0, and Lucania beat the New Westminster Queens Park Rangers 1-0.

Despite the sport’s long history in our province, only two players have been inducted into the sports shrine. A 2003 inductee, Tony Nocita played for Canada’s National team from 1986 to 1993 and captained Fury during the team’s six seasons. In 2004, Bob Harley, a centre half who played in Manitoba during the 1920s and captained a Canadian team that toured Australia in 1924, was a veteran inductee.

In 1980, soccer builder George Anderson was part of the Hall’s first group of inductees and Ernie Draffin joined him the next year. Other soccer builders honoured are Charlie Caithness (1986), Sam Davidson (1994), Fred Stambrook (2003), Ralph Cantafio (2004), who died in March, and Hector Vergara (2019). Christine O’Connor, a 2010 builder inductee, is the only female honouree. She was a leader in the growth of women’s soccer at the provincial and national level.