When announced his retirement from soccer in 2023, no Canadian had played more matches for the senior men’s national team. Which means it’s possible no Canadian had been the target of more training-session trash talk from professional club teammates strictly on account of his passport. “We knew the s—- we would take when we went back to our clubs after an embarrassing outing with Canada .
.. Our European teammates had never even heard of some of the countries we’d lose to,” Hutchinson writes in “The Beautiful Dream: A Memoir,” co-authored with sportswriter Dan Robson.
“They couldn’t understand why we’d waste our time playing for a country that wasn’t any good. We’d hear it constantly: ‘Man, Canada’s so s—-.’ I hated being told that my country was terrible (at) soccer and that I shouldn’t care about representing it.
” For sports fans who’ve only begun following the fortunes of Canada’s men’s national soccer team during recent days of new-found prosperity — say, with the or the dramatic run to — it’s one of the more startling bits of anecdotal history contained in Hutchinson’s new memoir. As much as the Brampton-raised Hutchinson enjoyed a marvellous career, climbing the club ranks through Sweden and Denmark and Turkey while making multiple appearances in the UEFA Champions League, never mind being named , the road to the top was often strewn with potholes. He was bizarrely cut from Ontario’s under-14 provincial team, this aft.