Back when Diana Matheson was a star midfielder for Canada’s national women’s soccer team, plays were analyzed using magnets on tactical boards. But in 2022, a year into her retirement, she found herself mapping out the country’s first pro women’s league on a bar napkin in Toronto’s west end with Thomas Gilbert, her partner at Project 8 Sports—the company they founded to bring the idea to life. It would be her biggest win yet, even bigger than her stealthy bronze-clinching kick at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

The Northern Super League launched this spring, with franchises in six cities—including Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax—and ambitions for many more. Overdue? Maybe. Or maybe perfectly timed: thanks to the Professional Women’s Hockey League and, soon, Toronto’s own WNBA team, women’s sports are popping all the way off in Canada. Still in its infancy, the NSL has already drawn sponsors like Coca-Cola, team owners like Matheson’s former teammate Christine Sinclair—“Sinc” to her—and investors like track hotshot Andre De Grasse. Forget exporting our female soccer greats to the States; we’re cheering for the home teams now. I spoke with Matheson days after she did just that, celebratory mimosa in hand, at the Montreal Roses’ first-ever home opener.

Take me back to the moment you stepped onto the field at BC Place for the Vancouver Rise match back in April—which just so happened to be the first-ever game of Canada’s first-ever women’s pro soccer league.

The day before, one of the Calgary players said it was like we were planning for our wedding. It goes by quickly, try to enjoy it, you’re not going to be able to talk to everyone—it was all of those things. During the pre-game celebration, Christine Sinclair and I were on the field. The most emotional I got was when they introduced me. I finished the game in the stands with some of our league partners, and we all felt a bit dissociated, like we were at a badass pro sports event but not our badass pro sports event.

Was it as good a feeling or better than your bronze-winning goal at London 2012?

London was surreal, joyful—all of that. This felt magnitudes bigger.

Of the 32 countries that competed in the last Women’s World Cup, only two didn’t have their own domestic pro leagues: Haiti and Canada. When did you think, If our league is ever going to get off the ground, I’m gonna have to do it?

The talk in Canada was always, “We’re going to start in two years, we’re going to start in two years.” We’d been having those conversations since 2007, so it didn’t seem like it was going to happen. This journey started for me when I was about 37. I’d always been interested in the business side of soccer, so my first step after retirement was to go get a few letters at the end of my name so I could be taken more seriously. The COC has a program called Game Plan that gave me a $100,000 scholarship to the MBA program at Queen’s Smith School of Business. I also got a scholarship to do a two-year transition program for players—an overview of the business of football. For 18 months, I was just a full-time student.

At what point did your “thesis” become the Northern Super League?

I did two major projects in those programs, and both related to the feasibility of........

© Macleans