When Jesse Marsch, the coach of the Canadian men's soccer team, walked into a news conference on a February morning in 2025, almost nobody was expecting the news. It was just another pre-tournament conference designed to gin up publicity for an event.
Coaches and officials representing the Concacaf Nations League semifinalists were gathered at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, California. The chatter was all soccer and soccer-adjacent: the difficulties of attracting players from European clubs during the international window, and how the games in Southern California should give Mexico an advantage.
But as the session was winding down, someone asked Marsch, an American, how he felt coaching Canada "with all this political stuff going on right now."
Political stuff? That was a polite way of referring to Donald Trump's insistence that Canada should become part of the United States, one of the early obsessions in his second term.
"I feel they have to become a state," Trump said. "They need our protection." Earlier, Trump had even referred to Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, as "Governor Carney."
Marsch was ready when the question came. The only American coaching a team in this summer's World Cup, he had been waiting for it since he had arrived at Sofi that morning. He had also been waiting for the moment, or one like it, for much of his professional life.
Marsch's coaching career has increasingly been driven by a quest for meaning, something more profound than player movements diagrammed on a whiteboard. That was one reason he turned down opportunities to manage clubs in top European leagues and chose Canada instead.
said. "And the higher I went, the fewer things I did that I loved and the more things I did that I hated. My ambition right now is to find the right environment where I feel fulfilled."
In another sense, though, the Canada job seemed like a consolation prize. When Marsch was fired in early 2023 by Leeds United after managing there for a year, the longest tenure of an American in the Premier League, he became a leading candidate to coach the U.S. men's national team. He was keen on the job, too; in the weeks that followed, he reneged on a commitment to another Premier League club because he felt confident U.S. Soccer would hire him. Instead, after Gregg Berhalter, the previous coach, was rehired, Marsch ended up with a lightly regarded team that has never won a World Cup match.
"When they said that they were hiring Gregg, I asked them why they called me in April," he told me in February. "Should've let me be."
"I'm never seen Jesse so upset," says Jim Curtin, the former Philadelphia Union coach who was Marsch's MLS teammate in Chicago and at Chivas USA. "He told me, 'Dude, I don't know what just happened. They just pulled this thing out from under me.' He thought the deal was done."
True to form, Marsch went all-in on Canada. Shortly before that Media Day, he'd journeyed the length of the country, nine cities in 10 days, staging clinics, taking questions, and greeting citizens like he was campaigning for office. "I need to know what being Canadian means," he explained. In the process, he became, as one of his players quipped, "more Canadian than we are."
Shortly before that media day, he journeyed the length of Canada -- nine cities in 10 days -- staging clinics, taking questions and greeting citizens like he was campaigning for office. "I need to know what being Canadian means," he said. In the process, he became, as one of his players quipped, "more Canadian than we are."
That's why Trump's comments affected him twice over. He was insulted for the Canadians he'd met across the country, and he was mortified as an American. Before the news conference, he made certain that if a question about Trump didn't come organically, he would have someone in the audience ready to ask it.
But there it was. Marsch took the microphone, his face set in a line and told the assembled media that he couldn't be prouder to represent Canada. "I've found a place that embodies for me the ideas and morals of what not just football and a team is, but what life is," he said. Then he looked into the camera and addressed Trump directly, speaking passion to power. "Lay off the ridiculous rhetoric about Canada being the 51st state," he said. "As an American, I'm ashamed."
And that made news.
As of that morning, Marsch's name recognition in Canada, where the coach of the national team is hardly a high-profile position, was limited to the soccer community. But those comments led Canadian newscasts. "I didn't even know who he was," said sprinter Donovan Bailey, a double gold medalist at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and one of Canada's most celebrated athletes. "That was the first time I heard his name. And then he opened the door. He knew what he wanted to say, and he said it. He went against the system, and I love it. We all love it."
Perhaps because Marsch is American, his rebuttal of Trump's covetous designs on Canada resonated more than any Canadian response. "Jesse made an apology for all Americans who don't believe this is a good administration," Jim Cuddy, a lead singer of the iconic Canadian country-rock band Blue Rodeo, told me. "And he did it in strong enough terms that it was a rebuke without crossing the line into ugly and vulgar. He did a perfect job."
In the days that followed, as the clip was replayed around Canada, Marsch became a national celebrity. "That moment was rallied around by many Canadians, many of whom weren't yet soccer fans," said Kevin Blue, Canada Soccer's CEO. "And the articulation of the feelings was done in such a thoughtful, poignant way that it inspired a lot of confidence in him as a leader."
It also gave millions of previously blasé Canadians a reason to care about soccer. "It's no surprise that, because of what he did, interest in the team went way up," Cuddy said.
To many new fans, the centerpiece of the Canadian team isn't Bayern Munich's Alphonso Davies or Juventus's Jonathan David, but Marsch. "Every single person I talk to asks what Jesse's like," said Jacob Shaffelburg, a forward for Canada and LAFC. "They all love Jesse."
It helps that this Canada team is more successful than any to come before it. In 29 matches under Marsch across tournaments and friendlies, Canada has won 12 and drawn nine. Last year, the team achieved its best FIFA world ranking of 26th. And as a custodian of and a cheerleader for Canadian soccer, Marsch has arguably done even better. "There's more soccer talk now," Bailey said. "And it's led by his voice and how impactful his words were. But not only that, he's setting up a mindset and an infrastructure of winning. Canada as a whole has never had that."
It's that less-tangible success that has Marsch in negotiations to remain as the national coach following the World Cup. "I'm tired of being judged by just my wins and my losses because I think I'm so much more than that," he says.
But don't misunderstand him. He is well aware that, beginning with Bosnia-Herzegovina on Friday in Toronto, there are matches that must be won, although even winning one would be an achievement. Canada's group stage record through two World Cups (1986 and 2022) sits at a painful 0-6. In the first four of those matches, Canada didn't score a goal. To properly appreciate the incongruity of Canada Soccer approaching a former Premier League manager to lead its men's team, understand that when Marsch's predecessor, John Herdman, was hired in 2018, he had never coached a men's soccer game at any level.
Blue, an Ontario native and former Stanford golfer, assumed control of Canada Soccer in early 2024 and was immediately tasked with hiring a men's coach before that summer's Copa América. He knew that Canada's automatic World Cup qualification this summer as a host nation made the job somewhat more desirable. He'd also spent five years as the athletic director at Division I UC Davis, which meant he understood the concept of punching above your weight, something of a permanent requirement for most sports teams (bar hockey, and maybe curling) representing Canada.
"What we are is a country with a population smaller than Texas," said Adam van Koeverden, Canada's Minister of Sport. "We're smaller than New York City. There are more people in Los Angeles."
There also might be more high-level soccer players. Canada hasn't ever had much of a soccer culture, nor a critical mass of the highly skilled players who emerge from such cultures. But it does have athletes. And where Marsch has succeeded as a coach -- in MLS, at Red Bull Salzburg, and in his first half-season at Leeds United -- it has been with athletes who were willing to run and press and then keep running. "If I had been the type of coach who emphasized ball control," Marsch said, "I never would have been interested."
But why was he interested under any circumstances? After Leeds, plenty of other clubs coveted his kinetic, high-energy football, while national teams can't afford anything close to what such clubs are willing to pay for a manager. Within a week, Southampton came calling. A few weeks later, Leicester City did the same. Clubs in LaLiga, the Bundesliga and others made pitches. Every situation sounded like the next Manchester City. Then Marsch would make deeper inquiries, finding double-talk and confusion. "They hadn't thought it out," he said.
Club football and international football are very different, of course, but both require coherent organizational structure and inspired planning to succeed. When Marsch spoke with Blue, his wife, Kim, listened in. "Wow, he was smart," she told him afterward. "He knows what's wrong. He knows how to fix it."
Marsch's most successful years, in New York and Salzburg, were scaffolded by the highly organized Red Bull system, where he won titles. Blue's pitch resembled a national team version; the various aspects of the organization -- competitive, developmental and financial -- were aligned. And the scope of the job also appealed, as one that could alter the country's relationship with the sport. For Marsch, finding a way to fall in love with each assignment is a prerequisite. "He has to believe in the project," said Sean Davis, who played for him in New York, "or his way of doing it won't work."
Also, Marsch is American -- from Kenosha, Wisconsin. In England, that had been a significant handicap. Marsch was perceived as out of his depth, a Ted Lasso with a Midwestern accent. The head coach of the Canadian men, on the other hand, is one of the few jobs in world football in which being American is considered a positive. Compared with Canada, the USMNT is the major leagues, and Marsch is the most successful American soccer coach on the international level.
Surprisingly, too, the money was there. Canada Soccer didn't have it, but the owners of the country's three MLS franchises (Vancouver Whitecaps, Toronto FC and CF Montréal) agreed to contribute $1.5 million toward a salary that is reportedly close to $2 million. That's only half of what Marsch was earning at Leeds, but it was enough for him to agree to coach the team through the World Cup.
And Marsch had a secret. He had done his homework and he was impressed. "This team," he told his coaches after one of their first practices together, "is going to be pretty good."
Marsch was trained in the Red Bull system, which has a definitive strategic and tactical footprint developed by Ralf Rangnick. The fundamental principles are simple. Goals usually happen within 10 seconds of winning the ball. And if you lose the ball, the eight seconds that follow provide the best chance of getting it back. So you press high to win the ball, counter-attack immediately once you have it, and do it all with suffocating intensity.
This was Marsch's template. "When people say, 'a Jesse Marsch team,' instantly everybody has a picture of it in their mind," said Jim Curtin, the former Philadelphia Union coach, who played with Marsch in Chicago and at Chivas USA. "And that's the biggest compliment you can give a coach."
Still, Marsch has won not with his tactics, which tend to be predictable, but with motivation. His players tend to perform better for him than for anyone else. "You're playing for a guy who is helping you achieve things you didn't even know were possible," Davis said. "Playing at a level you never knew you had. At an intensity you didn't know you had."
"He has an extremely high capacity for work," said Mitch Henderson, who became friendly with Marsch when they were undergraduates at Princeton and has been the school's men's basketball coach since 2011. "Not just mental work and preparation but physical work. He'll be like, 'Let's go on a moderate hike,' and then all of a sudden you're like, 'I'm on an advanced hike.' You didn't think you were ready to do it, and then you're doing it."
Marsch has a different kind of relationship with his players than most coaches do. Hired as an assistant by RB Leipzig in 2018, he learned German. "At 44, I didn't know what auf wiederzehen meant," he said. "At 46, I was coaching in German." At Red Bull Salzburg, he traveled with his players to experience their local festivals. "It's just more meaningful on match day," he said, "if you're more connected to people through their entire lives."
Davis was only a year out of Duke when he started playing for Marsch in New York. When Marsch heard that he was planning an off-season trip to Asia with some buddies, he created an entire itinerary for them in Cambodia. "It's a place we wouldn't have gone to without him," Davis said, "and even telling us how to get the visas so we could go. I can't imagine another coach doing that.
Such connections are an integral part of Marsch's coaching success. "The connection with people is draining for most coaches, but for Jesse it's energizing," Davis says. "He gets a lot of energy connecting with people, hearing their stories and understanding them at a deep level. He places a premium on relationships. And that's why he can walk into any locker room in the world and get the guys to buy in."
"His human skills are second to none," said Danish defender Rasmus Kristensen, who played for Marsch in Salzburg. "He taught us how to behave, how to work with each other seriously, but at the same time have fun." Marsch stressed to his players that mistakes are part of the game, but it was important to make the right ones. "That way of thinking changed my perspective on football," Kristensen said.
This motivational process is trickier at the national team level because a coach only occasionally sees his players. But the Copa América kicked off shortly after Marsch accepted the job in June 2024. Advancing through the tournament all the way to a semifinal helped bring the players and their new coach together. "I think he fell in love with our whole team during Copa," Shaffelburg said. "He saw who we are as people. He knows my wife's name, my daughter's name, all of that. And I'm someone who thrives it. Having that in the back of my head makes you want to work harder for him, that extra 1% or 2% or 3%."
Those extra percentage points can alter a player's trajectory. When Marsch arrived, he told winger Ali Ahmed that he didn't think Ahmed played with enough intensity. "We pushed him to be more physical, to sprint more, to react better, to calibrate his mind not to completing passes but to being dynamic," Marsch said. Watching, say, a top Premier League game on television or from the stands, it's easy to be impressed by the geometric elegance of the passes. "But when you stand on the sidelines of those games," Marsch says, "you know what hits you? Speed and power. Like, when something happens, it happens." Stop thinking this is chess, he told Ahmed. "The game," he said, "doesn't operate like that."
Ahmed listened. Before long, Ahmed was featured regularly for Canada. "And when you feel you're playing well for the national team, and your national team trusts you and believe in you, and then you go back to your club, you're going to have confidence," Ahmed said. Back with MLS's Vancouver Whitecaps, a coach told him, "You play like Ronaldo with Canada. And now I expect the same here."
Ahmed had a breakout 2025 season with the Whitecaps. In January, he signed with Norwich City, in England's second-tier Championship, and immediately started bagging goals. Once a fringe player on the Canadian team, he's now the probable first-team left winger for Friday's opening game, and he credits the player-development feedback loop that started with Marsch's criticism. "The success here," he said, "is helping me there."
It is intriguing to wonder where the USMNT would be had Marsch been hired to coach the team in 2023. And that nearly happened, at least from his perspective. That April, he was about to sign a lucrative contract with Leicester City, which was desperate to avoid relegation. "For more money than I've made the rest of my career combined," he said.
He was at the club's training ground getting fingerprinted for a visa when Cindy Parlow Cone, U.S. Soccer's president, called his cell. "She said she heard I was signing with Leicester and asked me not to because they wanted me to coach the U.S. team," he said. "I was led to believe that the U.S. job was mine." Hearing that, Marsch walked away from Leicester City, for which the club apparently hasn't forgiven him. "They still won't talk to me," he said. "Or my agent." A month later, Berhalter was rehired.
Today, Marsch feels fortunate. "If I was with the U.S. national team right now and Trump was in office, this would be difficult for me," he said. "I don't know if I would take the position in that situation. And if I already had it, I might have resigned." As Davis said, Marsch must be fully invested in a situation to be involved with it at all. "And with the United States right now," he said, "I'm out."
The idea of an American trying to take Canada further into the World Cup than his own country will make charting the two teams' fortunes over the coming weeks that much more compelling, as opposed to the USMNT, which has a highly competitive group that includes Paraguay, Australia and Türkiye. Canada's should be one of the more manageable. The highest-ranked of the three other teams, Switzerland, is 19th. The others, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Qatar, are not likely to be competitive. If Canada wins the group, it will play its first knockout match before friendly fans in Vancouver on July 2.
And while Mexico was trounced by Colombia and lost to Paraguay in late 2025, and the U.S. dropped three games during a stretch of eight friendlies, Canada has currently gone more than half a year without a defeat, beating or drawing formidable teams such as Colombia, Tunisia and Wales. "We feel we have a really strong team," Marsch said recently. "One of our goals is to be the strongest representative of the North American region in the tournament."
That status depends on his standout players staying healthy, Marsch knows -- specifically, Bayern's Davies. In February, Marsch flew to Germany to visit Davies, who had been inactive with a torn ACL. He wasn't there to gauge his form or fitness, but on a personal level: to show support for his captain and most important player and hear his thoughts and ideas. "He wants to know what's going on in my head," Davies said. "What I see with the guys. What the guys are saying to me."
Marsch was also there to spread the word about Canada. Few North Americans, and no American, have greater cachet in the sport. Watching Davies play at a DFB Pokal semifinal at Allianz Arena, Marsch sat two seats from Michael Ballack, the former Bayern and Chelsea star. "Michael, how are you, my friend?" Marsch said, leaning over to shake Ballack's hand. Across the aisle, slumped low in his seat like a teenager, was Julian Nagelsmann, Germany's coach, who had greeted Marsch warmly.
Before he extended his contract, football executives at such events inquired about Marsch's availability after the World Cup. Despite that, Marsch decided months ago that he wanted to say around for the next one. "Because of the people, because of the project, because of the opportunity, because of the collaboration." As he ticks off specific reasons, he gets increasingly enthusiastic. "We still have a training center to build -- we've raised the money, but now we need to build it. We need to build out the youth development. We need to really create the playing style."
Purely as a soccer coach, the challenge of making Canada competitive internationally is more than enough to keep Marsch interested. And the position offers him so much more. He spreads his arms wide, as if he's about to wrap them around everything in his field of vision. "It has been," he says, "rewarding and fulfilling to me beyond anything I could have imagined."
