The Vancouver Whitecaps Are A Fan’s Dream — And A Marketing Nightmare

There is an undeniable poetry to the nature of Inter Miami’s most noteworthy tournament defeats since the arrival of Lionel Messi and several of his former FC Barcelona teammates.

In the 2024 Concacaf Champions Cup, the Herons exited in the quarterfinals to a CF Monterrey squad that has decisively been the best in Concacaf competition over the last decade-and-a-half, and seem intent on showing it would not be supplanted easily.

In the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, Miami fell to an Atlanta United side that would not have even qualified for the postseason without an expansion of the playoff format meant to satisfy new streaming partner Apple TV. The outcome no doubt cost the company hundreds of thousands of viewers over the rest of the postseason.

Now comes the demolition of Messi’s Miami over two legs of their Concacaf Champions Cup semifinal series against the Vancouver Whitecaps, a team that is the polar opposite of the Herons, in that they are a hard-core fan’s dream, but a marketing professional’s nightmare.

For fans, there’s everything to love.

The Whitecaps have talent in its prime in Ryan Gauld and Brian White. They have youth and promise for the future, particularly in budding stars Sebastian Berhalter, Jayden Nelson and Ped. They have a coach in Jesper Sorensen who appears capable of getting the very best from his players. And they have a front office that was willing to pay to send several hundred of its fans to the return leg to witness what may have been the biggest moment in club history.

Matches are also among the more accessible in the league, with games rarely sold out even in the lower bowl when Messi isn’t in town.

And yet, if you were in MLS offices brainstorming the traits you’d want the best team in your league to possess, the Whitecaps fall short in so many ways it’s almost comical. Consider the following attributes – or lack thereof.

Star Power

That Vancouver have accomplished their run to the final without Scottish playmaker Ryan Gauld for the last two rounds is nothing short of remarkable. But even if he’s the ‘Caps best player, he’s barely an established name in Scotland, with only six caps for a senior national team that hasn’t qualified for a World Cup since 1998.

Brian White is a far better forward than most people realize, but his name feels like it was lifted straight out of your 2043 Football Manager roster. Then there’s the emerging Sebastian Berhalter, the second-most famous Berhalter in MLS.

Market Visibility

In North American sports, there is both Canadian bias and West Coast bias against clubs in the Pacific Time Zone and north of the border, and the Whitecaps are the lone MLS team lucky enough to combat both. Many home league matches don’t finish until after midnight Eastern Time. Traveling to visit even the closest rival requires a passport.

At roughly 2.6 million people, the Vancouver metro area is also the smallest of the three Canadian metros in MLS, about two-thirds the size of Montreal’s and less than half that of Toronto’s.

Ownership

The team is literally for sale, with significant concerns that it could relocate. What’s more, although the current ownership group publicly confirmed its intention to sell last December, there hasn’t been any reported movement in that search for a new buyer. Compare that to Real Salt Lake, whose sale was completed to a new local buyer only a few weeks after the potential transaction was first reported.

The only good news on this front is that the obvious strong foundation of the current ownership group should make the club a more appealing property to investors.

Venue

B.C. Place is a modern stadium and a 2026 World Cup host site. But the Whitecaps’ status as the secondary tennant behind the CFL’s B.C. Lions is probably the second-least-adventageous arrangement in all of MLS, behind only New York City FC’s alternating baseball stadiums. And NYCFC will soon have its own venue.

The CFL schedule starts two months before the NFL, meaning it intersects with a much larger segment of the MLS schedule. And of the two teams that share a venue with a CFL team, only Vancouver plays indoors and on a synthetic surface.

The point of this exercise isn’t to take the air out of the Vancouver balloon, although some fans will probably feel that way. Everything the Whitecaps have achieved so far has been thoroughly deserved, and the MLS league office and all of its clubs – even the Cascadia rivals – should be rooting for Sorensen’s group in the June final.

The lesson here – again – is that the kind of dynastic sporting brands MLS so clearly seems to want Messi and Inter Miami to become can’t be syntheitcally engineered. Star power and spending power clearly play a role in pro sports, but in the end the results always have to be earned in a competitive arena that also rewards intangibles that Vancouver has in spades and Miami currently lacks.

That doesn’t mean Inter Miami can’t or won’t earn them; they did, after all, win the 2023 Leagues Cup and 2024 Supporters’ Shield. But so much of how MLS (and in one case FIFA) has operated feels designed to foster such successes at the expense of using Miami’s rising tide to lift all boats.

We’ve seen the introduction of a cumbersome postseason that cheapens league play and is supposedly designed to diminish first-round upsets, the placement of the Herons in the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup based on suspicious criteria, and the conspicuous absence of a Miami match during this March’s FIFA international window, during which 28 other MLS teams played on.

The Vancouver Whitecaps, and all of MLS’ marketing nightmares relative to the Miami Messi Machine, deserve better.