Last month, the 4 Nations Challenge took the sports world by storm, with the Canadians’ dramatic 3-2 victory over the United States in the championship capturing 16.1 million viewers in North America. That made it the second-most watched hockey game of the past century, and it also continued the developing rivalry between the two nations.
Canadian fans had booed the American national anthem earlier in the tournament, and there were three fights in the opening moments of the U.S.-Canada round-robin meeting, an eventual 3-1 U.S. win. But after Canada got revenge in the final, former prime minister Justin Trudeau posted on X, “You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game,” a clear shot at President Donald Trump’s previous comments about making Canada the 51st state.
At his Concacaf Nations League press conference, Canada men’s soccer coach Jesse Marsch said he’s hoping to use the rising tensions to inspire his team, in response to a question from The Ringer’s Katie Baker.
“Look, I traded texts with [Canada hockey coach] Jon Cooper. We haven’t had the chance to speak yet. … Maybe [it] caught the Canadians a little bit by surprise and the Americans having their national anthem booed and everything else might have lit a fire under them, but then the second game, our Canadian national team kind of knew what the game was going to require. And that’s going to be important for us.
“We know that there’s a charged atmosphere around what these international games mean now. These aren’t things I need to describe to them. I will say this, I’ve tried to use the Canadian hockey mentality with our players to say, ‘Look at the identity of the Canadian hockey players’ and they are at their grittiness, when things are tough, they play their best, that they’re hard, that they’re strong, that they’re up for challenges, that they’re not they’ll never back down from a fight. We need to build this more and more into who we are, into our identity, but do it in our way, in our football way. And I think they have, I think they’ve grown a lot in the time I’ve known them and again I’m excited for Thursday.”
Marsch, 51, is a Wisconsin native and longtime MLS player who made two appearances for the USMNT and coached in the MLS after he retired. He then rose to global soccer prominence in 2019-20, when he led Red Bull Salzburg to league and cup titles. He later took over at RB Leipzig and eventually Leeds United. Canada hired him in May 2024, and four months later, Canada beat the USMNT in the States for the first time since 1957.
Last month, Marsch criticized President Trump’s words, calling them “unsettling and frankly insulting” and “ridiculous,” and he had more to say at Tuesday’s press conference.
“I’m not going to get political right now. I think I’ve made my statements clear and known. I will say that from watching the Four Nations in hockey, you can see that the climate for sports in North America has been elevated for national teams. I’m hopeful that this tournament can be the best reflection of our societies, and that we don’t have to waste time booing national anthems and getting caught up in politics. And we can just focus on the players and the teams and supporting the love of the game, the love of the sport and whatever your nationality is, that you [are able to] support your team all the way.
“And that’s been our focus, right? We haven’t even addressed internally, in the team, the political situation. We’ve just focused on the fact that we want to be at our best, specifically on Thursday because we really respect our opponent in Mexico and we want to give ourselves the best chance to move on and compete for a trophy on Sunday.”
USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino, meanwhile, said, “We cannot mix political things with sports,” which Marsch, of course, already has.
It all could lead to another wrinkle in another championship match: If the USMNT can beat Panama (Thursday on Paramount+ at 7 p.m. ET) and Canada can beat Suriname (Thursday on Paramount+ at 9 p.m. ET), they’d meet in Sunday’s final at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
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