Jesse Marsch, the American who led Canada to its first World Cup knockout stage win ever, has stirred emotions in North America and beyond. Marsch’s fans, which include the likes of Canadian icons Wayne “The Great One” Gretzky and, apparently now, Michael Bublé (more on that below), credit him for turning around the Canadian soccer program and inspiring a fervor around a sport that’s on the upswing up north. At the same time, his comments about Canadians being more enthusiastic singers of their national anthem than Americans and his insistence he “doesn’t give a sh-t” about critics who knocked his on-field postgame speech to his team after Canada’s dramatic 1-0 round-of-32 win over South Africa on Sunday as “performative” have rankled more than a few.
World Cup fans and pundits all suddenly have their take on Canada’s animated soccer coach, who’s now responsible for the country’s only two World Cup victories in its history. TIME caught up with Marsch this week by phone – he’s in Houston, where his team is preparing to face Morocco in the round of 16 on July 4 – to talk about the uproar and more.
(Disclosure: Marsch, who played soccer at Princeton in the 1990s, and I attended college at same time; we have many mutual friends and have spent time together socially in recent years.)
After your team beat South Africa, you told your players they were “Canadian heroes” during a passionate postgame speech on the field. Why, in your mind, are they heroes?
Look, people have been wanting to share their opinions, and often ill-informed opinions, about how I behaved in different moments on the bench. Why I do a circle after the game. Why I celebrated with the fans when we won six-nil. But this is the World Cup. Everybody watches and everybody gets excited about it. And I do too.
This project, for me, is so much more than just the first team. It's about trying to build the sport in the country and take a lot of the raw talent, from both
