The CPL Handed Less Minutes To Domestic Youth Athletes This Year
Excerpts of the following story by John Jacques in the Northern Tribune https://northerntribune.ca/canadian-premier-league-youth-minutes-2022/ are from from October 11, 2022.
In a surprising statistic, the Canadian Premier League actually handed out less minutes to its own domestic youth athletes this season after the mandatory number of minutes per club went up.
This year saw all eight teams in the league combine for 26,671 minutes handed to Canadian U-21 athletes, with York United alone dolling out some 25.9% of that total. While that cuts a pretty stellar figure at face value, it’s actually a decrease from last year’s 33,076 minutes earned by the next generation of Canadian talent.
In all, that’s a 20% drop – not exactly small potatoes.
It’s worth noting that this calculation of minutes come from the league’s own tally, which caps the contribution of each club’s on-loan domestic youth athletes to 1,000 per club. That shifted Valour’s minute count to 2,753 overall despite the fact that CF Montreal loanees Sean Rea and Jonathan Sirois have actually combined for 3,983 this season.
After we calculated the grand total of youth minutes overall for a true total minute value, the league handed 30,042 minutes to its U-21 Canadian athletes, which halves the decrease to a more reasonable 9%.
Capping the loan minutes is an effort to ensure clubs develop their own youth talent rather than becoming ‘Loan FC’, per se. This year saw York, Halifax, Valour, Pacific, and Cavalry all clock in less youth minutes than they registered last year, with only Valour and FC Edmonton impacted the loan limit cap in this year’s calculations.
It’s important to note that despite the dip, the Canadian Premier League is still playing a vital role in youth development – especially when compared to Major League Soccer, in which some of the line-ups don’t often feature more than a minimal spattering of Canadian talent, and these aren’t typically the up-and-coming ones, either.
For the rest of the story by John Jacques from the Northern Tribune, please go to https://northerntribune.ca/canadian-premier-league-youth-minutes-2022/.