During the women’s soccer bronze medal game at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Canada was one goal away from their first Olympic soccer medal in 108 years.
Diana Matheson stepped up in the game’s most pivotal moment. During the second minute of extra time, the Canadian midfielder sent the ball past the sprawling French goalkeeper to break the game’s deadlock and secure the win for Canada.
As the ball crossed the line, Matheson joined the roaring contingent of Canadian fans in celebrating a turning point for the nation’s women’s soccer program.
“We’d had some limited success on the world stage, pretty much the same roster for over a decade and no one really knew who we were,” Matheson told the Charlatan, reflecting on the moment more than a decade later.
“It was a totally different landscape before and after that London 2012 bronze. We came home from that Olympics and suddenly I was being recognized in the subway in Toronto.”
After flying home from London, the Canadian women’s team never looked back — the team won another bronze medal in Rio at the 2016 Summer Olympics, followed by its first-ever gold medal at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
“That gave us a platform that we’ve all been able to build on that we didn’t have before,” Matheson said.
Years later, she started using that platform to push for a domestic professional women’s soccer league in Canada.
With Matheson as its founder, the Northern Super League (NSL) was announced in May 2024 and is set to kick off this year on April 16. Inaugural clubs include Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Halifax and Ottawa’s own Rapid FC, which will play games at TD Place.
For the league’s first season, NSL clubs will have a roster capacity of 25 players, and a maximum of eight international players. The league will allocate a $1.6 million salary cap for each team, enforcing a league minimum salary of $50,000. It’s a big upgrade from the National Women’s Soccer League’s launch in 2013, when it set an original minimum salary of only $6,000 USD.
“We looked at a living wage in Canada, and we felt like $50,000 was a minimum salary we could support based on all that,” Matheson said.
This will make the NSL’s minimum salary among the highest of all professional women’s leagues worldwide. It’s a higher minimum salary by $20,000 and a higher salary cap by nearly $400,000 when compared to the domestic men’s Canadian Premier League.
“If we’re asking our players to be professional, we need to provide them a living wage to start,” Matheson said. “So that’s the number we’re starting with and then we’ll look to grow that as our revenues grow as well.”
On top of founding the league, Matheson is a co-owner of Ottawa’s Rapid FC, alongside her former Queen’s University classmate, Thomas Gilbert.
According to Gilbert, who is also the team’s CEO, his reunion with Matheson on this project was “not a coincidence at all.” The two talked about the idea for years until Matheson asked Gilbert to formally join the project through a voice note in June 2022.
Kristina Kiss, Matheson’s former teammate, also joined as Rapid FC’s technical director.
In October 2024, Kiss tapped Katrine Pedersen, her former Norwegian league teammate and former captain of Denmark’s national team, as Rapid FC’s first head coach.
“I think we brought in a world-class coaching staff,” Kiss said. “That was really important to us.”
“We’re still working on the roster buildup and bringing in the top players, the best players that we can from across Canada and internationally,” she added.
Although unfinished, Ottawa’s roster includes Canadian defender Liv Scott, an NCAA alumna from Quinnipiac University, who signed with the team on Jan. 10.
Despite originally aspiring to play professionally in Europe, when this opportunity came up to play in Canada, Scott said she “didn’t really want to pass it up.”
“It’s something new … for us Canadians to play professionally in our home country,” she said.
Kiss, who spent years working with youth since 2021as the manager of development and programming for Canada Soccer, echoed the importance of having opportunities to play professionally at home for Canadian soccer players.
“I talked to a lot of our youth players, and they didn’t know it was possible to earn a living playing soccer,” Kiss said. “They haven’t necessarily seen soccer at a high level and had the opportunity to idolize players coming out of Canada.”
The NSL poses as a platform for young girls to see professional soccer as an opportunity in Canada instead of one that only exists outside of its borders.
“Growing up, I think you look up to the Canadian women’s national team, but now that there’s this pool of new players in this league, it’s an opportunity for young kids to look at them and look at the league, and I think that’s really cool and inspiring,” Scott said.
But the NSL has the potential to create jobs beyond the roster.
“The opportunity to play pro sport is now a possibility for sons and daughters out there,” Matheson said. “And beyond that, not every little girl wants to be a professional athlete.”
That this new league could create an industry around domestic professional women’s soccer, Matheson said, employing coaches, referees, sports medicine doctors, media, business and more.
“We want to make all those opportunities visible for everyone,” Matheson said.
Lending to the league’s visibility in its inaugural season is a multi-year partnership with CBC and TSN, signed in June 2024 to broadcast games starting in April. With a new broadcasting deal, the league can cast a larger net to raise fan engagement in the stands and beyond.
“I am very confident that when this league starts in year one, we are already going to have an average attendance that is in the top four leagues in the world,” Matheson said.
Only four days after Scott’s own signing that confidence became tangible in Ottawa. On Jan. 14, Rapid FC signed Scott’s idol out of retirement: midfielder Desiree Scott (who shares no familial relation with her new Rapid FC teammate).
Desiree Scott is a Team Canada veteran who finally won an Olympic gold medal in 2020 after twice earning bronze with Matheson in 2012 and 2016.
“What a small world,” Liv Scott said. “What are the odds the player that I used to watch when I was younger all the time is now playing on my team?”
That same night, in front of more 6,500 fans gathered to watch the city’s other professional women’s sports team, the PWHL’s Ottawa Charge, Rapid FC announced its big signing.
The enthusiastic reception from that crowd, which has made the PWHL franchise a smashing success through its first year and a half, was a good sign for Gilbert.
“The noise level in that arena when Desi Scott’s face flashed on the screen gave me a lot of confidence,” he said. “This city is ready for women’s professional soccer.”
Graphic by Alisha Velji.
