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Canada is, of course, some distance today from teams like Spain, France or Argentina, led by superstars like Lamine Yamal, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi.

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But there is some precedent of a hosting role at a World Cup presaging a rise in the national team’s results.

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The Canadian national women’s team was not a world power when this country hosted the Women’s World Cup in 2015. In the years that followed, the team led by Christine Sinclair took home the bronze medal at the 2016 Olympics and won Olympic gold at Tokyo 2020 (played a year later due to the global pandemic).

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Sinclair has since retired, but Canadian women are regulars at some of the biggest club teams in the world such as Chelsea, Lyon and Bayern Munich.

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Olivia Smith, who plays for London giants Arsenal, would have been 10 years old, watching at home, when Canada hosted the Women’s World Cup. Jayde Riviere, who plays for Manchester United, would have been 14.

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The knock-on effects of hosting a tournament like the World Cup is something that sports leaders often cite as a key reason to pursue those opportunities.

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David Shoemaker, the president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, spoke about the transformative nature of being in the middle of a big tentpole event in an interview with Postmedia last year.

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“We hosted the Vancouver (Olympic) Games (in 2010). We hosted the Toronto Pan-Am 2015 Games,” he said, noting the facilities like an aquatic centre and cycling velodrome that are still used as training venues more than a decade later.

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“You can really trace back your current success to investment choices that have been made, both in sport organizations, but also in facilities and infrastructure. I believe that the hosting of the World Cup and matches in Canada and people seeing our men’s national team perform on the world stage in a home World Cup will inspire an entire new generation of boys and girls to play soccer.”

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Two decades from now, Shoemaker figures, there will be another generation of journalists considering Canada’s place in the soccer world and looking back at the summer of 2026 as an inflection point.

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“They’ll be saying, ‘Wow, that was a spark that got ignited there,’ right?,” Shoemaker said.

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One factor that could help make such optimistic predictions come true is that the Canadian team that will begin its tournament on Friday against Bosnia-Herzegovina in Toronto is the best in the country’s history by some distance.

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Where once Canadian men played professionally almost exclusively for Major League Soccer clubs in North America, now they are attached to teams playing in some of the strongest leagues in the world.

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Alphonso Davies (Germany), Tajon Buchanan (Spain), Jonathan David (Italy) and Liam Millar and Cyle Larin (England) have shown that it’s possible for Canadians to compete with the world’s best. And that kind of exposure — playing regularly against elite opponents — should only help the Canadian team at a tournament like the World Cup.

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But what would help the prospect of a leap forward for the Canadian team in the future  more than anything would be a deep run in the present. Or, at least, a modest run. And the prospects for that are decent, which would have been unthinkable back in the days of the 8-1 loss to Honduras.

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How much do results matter? Alex Ho of The Voyageurs says that as the Canadian men romped through their qualifying campaign to book their place at Qatar 2022, dues-paying membership in the supporters group shot from around 900 to more than 4,000.