Structure
The professional league structure in Canada coincides with the league competitions of the neighbouring United States. Promotion and relegation does not occur between any league levels. Formally, Canada does not have a fully professional national league. The top professional clubs in Canada compete in the Canadian Championship for the Voyageurs Cup, which is the country's national championship trophy and which earns the winner the right to play in the CONCACAF Champions League.
Since the introduction of Major League Soccer (MLS) in the US, the popularity of the United Soccer Leagues (USL), where most of the Canadian clubs competed, declined. With the decision to introduce Canadian clubs to MLS, with Toronto FC joining in 2006, the Toronto Lynx began playing in the amateur-level USL Premier Development League (PDL). Two other Canadian clubs have since joined MLS: Vancouver Whitecaps FC joined in 2011 and the Montreal Impact joined in 2012.
Changes to and the evolution of the leagues based in the United States, particularly the decline of the USL second and third tier leagues has allowed the Canadian Soccer League (CSL) to establish itself as a semi-professional league in Canada, considering regional expansion to become the largest national domestic league.
Read more about this topic: Canadian Soccer Pyramid
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)