No other team in the world attracts as much attention as the Canadian men’s soccer team

When you start to believe that sports make sense, think of Jacob Shaffelburg.

Six years ago, the 24-year-old striker from Kentville, NS, played in the second division of the American Soccer League.

Toronto FC had him for a while, but then traded him to Nashville. You could say he was sent to the football hinterlands, if that wasn't true of almost all of Major League Soccer.

Today, Shaffelburg earns the salary of a hard-working doctor, even though he doesn't score often. He's that dying breed of professional athlete – an occasional pro.

But when you put him on in his country's colours, Shaffelburg turns into Bluenose George Best. He was back in action on Saturday, taking on the United States.

The game was a friendly and therefore shouldn't have mattered. But this game was important for both teams.

The U.S. men's national team is in turmoil right now. They had to fire the coach they should have fired after the last World Cup, Gregg Berhalter, but he got into a fight with the parents of a star player, so the team kept him to prove itself. You know what they say about making a point.

The U.S. team has agreed to hire its first major coach, Mauricio Pochettino, but has not yet announced it. On Saturday, the team was coached by interim coach Mike Varas.

It's a bit like insisting on driving to your dealer even though there's smoke pouring out from under the hood. The closer you get, the worse it gets.

An additional difficulty: Canada's men's team had not beaten the United States in 67 years. On Saturday, that happened.

Shaffelburg scored the first goal in Canada's 2-1 victory, a goal that was a microcosmic expression of how the identities of these two teams have changed over the past year.

Instead of shooting the ball down the field, the Americans tried to play it out from their own half.

They failed to complete two passes before Canada intercepted the ball.

While the Americans fell back as if from nowhere, Minions Sketch, Canada let the ball slide around too much for one pass. No matter. Shaffelburg slid it past the American goalkeeper, who seemed to be vogueing on the spot or something.

The American team has a lot of problems, but they can be boiled down to one data point: When a player who doesn't score points against the San Jose Earthquakes scores points against you, it's time to rethink.

The result was big news in Canada and in the small part of the United States that cares about soccer. You can't say a new rivalry was born. Rather, it's like an old rivalry was revived out of nowhere.

This could also be the rare case where a disastrous game is the best outcome for both participants.

A loss to Canada is the lowest point in American soccer (American soccer hopes). It's like losing a baseball game to Luxembourg.

It's only up from here. The new guy comes in, wins a game against Guatemala or Peru, and they'll tear down a wall at US Soccer to build a bigger trophy room.

For Canada, it is more of an investment gain.

The future of Canadian soccer has never been clearer. There are two things – whatever the outcome of the promised resolution of the spying scandal, followed by the men's soccer World Cup in 2026. The order is not in question, but the timing is.

When is the best time to set fire to your business premises? Quite simply: when no one is there.

The first step is to isolate the key players – in this case the actual actors. Who knew? How much did they know? How much did they say about what they knew, and can this be cleaned up?

Depending on these answers, some people may move forward. Maybe a lot of people.

Although the men's team was vaguely linked to the matter in the early stages through anonymous reports, they managed to do what the women's team could not: they said nothing.

Who handled the material other than the players? Who gave the orders and to whom? Are they still there? Then they can also be discarded.

Nobody is really happy. Canadian women's national team coach Bev Priestman was suspended for a year during the Olympics, and that's the last we've heard of her.

When a team that should be taking the obvious steps to put a scandal behind it instead goes into hibernation mode, conspiracy theories are prone to arise.

There are still 22 months until the start of the World Cup. When do you think is the best time for such an investigative explosion?

Later always seems better to the administrators. But then you have to trust that some self-serving former employee and/or reporter won't come along first and blow up your ammunition depot. That would be worse.

What if there's someone involved that you really don't want to get rid of? That just puts things off even further. The longer you wait, the worse it gets. The worse it gets, the longer you'd rather wait.

In the meantime, only one thing can help you: win. And not just any win. Someone who shouldn't win has to go crazy.

It can't be the women's team's fault. They are too compromised. The less we see of them until this is over, the better.

Enter Shaffelburg and the Canadian men's national team. From their appearance in the Copa America final this summer to their humiliation of the USA on Saturday, no team in the world draws more attention than Canada.

It hasn't been an underdog for a long time, but it has never been a high-flyer either. Is that possible? At a home World Cup? Saturday's victory suggests that it is possible.

The future of Canada's soccer program and its leaders looks bleak, but the future of Canada's men's team could be bright. The next two years will tell which of these stories is told more often.