How East Van’s Victor Montagliani is bringing the World Cup to B.C.

Just off Nanaimo Street in East Vancouver lies a block-long patch of grass adjacent to a playground and basketball and tennis courts called Garden Park. The grass, splotches of it barren and brown, is bookended by large metal soccer nets on either side.

It looks entirely unspectacular—a neighbourhood park that tired parents use to distract their kids for a few minutes before they move on to the next activity. You’d never know it serves a leading role in the origin story of one of the most influential sporting figures Canada has ever seen.

It was here, some 50 years ago, that you could find a young Victor Montagliani playing D.O.N.K.E.Y. with his friends, kicking a soccer ball against what was then a wooden wall before it was replaced by the green fence that sits behind the nets today.

A half century later, Montagliani, now president of CONCACAF (the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football) and chairperson of the 2026 Men’s World Cup, gets out of his black SUV and crosses the street confidently. In some countries, he wouldn’t be able to walk the 50 metres to the park without a mob of people on top of him.

As the “Tony Soprano of East Van”—a comparison more than one person made to me—walks toward the middle of the field in his blue suit, I start to wonder whether photographer Adam Blasberg and I are going to be greeted with carefully chosen and vaguely threatening words about the mistakes we’ve made.

Thankfully, that’s not the case. Montagliani showcases an easy friendliness that I never saw in six seasons of The Sopranos. He also can’t help looking around and waxing poetic about the days that were. “This field, man… You got up in the morning and you played, recess you played, lunch you played, after school you played until your mom would scream ‘Dinner!’ from down the street,” says the 58-year-old who went to Lord Nelson Elementary and Templeton Secondary School, both nearby. His parents still live a couple of blocks away—he’s just come from coffee at their house.

“In the development world, they say you have to have 10,000 hours to maximize your skills,” he notes. “Well, most of the guys I grew up with easily had those 10,000 hours. We were always playing.”

Ball is life

Montagliani grew up in a soccer family. Three uncles played professionally in Italy. His dad, Luciano, was, in Montagliani’s words, a “nutbar soccer guy.” The elder Montagliani was one of the founders of the Italian Canadian Sports Federation and was the president of Columbus FC, a storied East Vancouver soccer club that was launched to provide a team for Italian immigrants in Vancouver. The club was later inducted into the BC Soccer Hall of Fame and served as a training ground for players like Bobby Lenarduzzi.

“His dad painted his little mini pickup truck black with blue stripes, the colours of [Italian soccer club] Inter Milan,” says Franco Iuele, a long-time friend and former teammate of Montagliani’s. “You’d see [Luciano] driving around Commercial Drive with it. And his younger brother Mario was named after an Inter player.”

Montagliani was a formidable player himself, eventually playing professionally with Columbus and with the Canadian national futsal team (futsal is essentially indoor soccer with a smaller ball). “He was mature above his years, and as a player he was really skilled with a great left foot shot,” says James Crescenzo, a former Templeton Secondary School teacher who also served as coach of the soccer team. “When we had our meetings, he was always the first guy to get there. I started teaching when he was in Grade 11 and he was really a young man. Incredibly easy to coach—always a positive person encouraging others on the field and in the classroom.”

Iuele and Montagliani both played centre midfield for Columbus. “He’d say, ‘Get the ball to me,’” Iuele remembers. “We had this relationship—he was the brains and I would chase and get the ball and find him.”

Ensuring success

Eventually, though, all those hours of kicking the ball around took its toll. Montagliani had four reconstructive surgeries on his ankles and gave up the professional soccer life. He began studies at SFU and graduated with a degree in political science. He also brushed up on his French and Spanish skills to the point where he’s now fluent in four languages (those two plus English and Italian).

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do at first. “He’s probably going to kill me for telling you this, but he was a flight attendant at one point,” laughs Iuele. “He had just finished SFU, and he calls me and says, ‘Frenchy’—that’s what he calls me—‘I got a job. I’m going to be a flight attendant.’ What? In those tiny little aisles pushing the cart? Now it’s kind of ironic, because travelling was his first big job and now he travels all the time with his really big job.”

After that stint, Montagliani applied to work at what was then called the Royal Guardian Insurance Company of Canada, which had an office in downtown Vancouver. “They had a two-year training program, which is unheard of in other industries. They don’t usually train people for two minutes,” says Montagliani. “It gave me such a great base.”

He changed jobs a couple of times, first to an independent firm and then to a brokerage firm before he was approached by Alex Meier and his partners, who wanted to start their own firm. Today, that’s called Axis Insurance and is a national outfit with over 300 employees and 10 offices. Meanwhile, Montagliani’s side hustle was growing into something a lot larger.

Managing expectations

In 2002, Montagliani was approached by his friend William Azzi, then-president of the Vancouver Metro Soccer League. “He said, ‘Listen, we need someone with a business background to join the board of BC Soccer,” recalls Montagliani. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t really want to do it, I’m too busy. But okay, I’ll do it for you. But just a year, okay?’ It always happens that way.”

By 2004, Montagliani was the president of the BC Soccer Association and went about revamping the organization from a nonprofit to more of a business. “We had no technical department—I brought one in and professionalized it. And brought in a lot more revenue,” he says. According to documents in BC Soccer’s heritage archive, when Montagliani came in, the association was generating $1.4 million in revenue and had lost $117,269 in the previous fiscal year. A few years later, the association hit $4.4 million in revenue and reported $186,630 in excess revenue.

In those days, after you served as president of BC Soccer, you were given a board seat at Canada Soccer. Montagliani did that until 2012, when he ran for president of the federal body. “I can say this now, because it doesn’t sound so bad, but I knew I was going to win,” he says.

Canada had just been awarded the 2015 Women’s World Cup (which Montagliani says was “the first Women’s World Cup that showed the world it wasn’t about gender, it was about football and that transcended gender… And it was the first time a Women’s World Cup made money”) and Montagliani was at dinner at Vancouver’s Il Giardino with Canada Soccer general secretary Peter Montopoli and long-time Olympics executive Walter Sieber.

“We had just won the bid for the Women’s World Cup and [Sieber] says to me: ‘Vic, it’s time. The Men’s World Cup.’ ‘Are you kidding me? We just got this one.’ ‘Yeah, with you as president, that’s our opportunity. You’re starting to be recognized internationally, it’s time.’ So, I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’”

When the plan was made public, pessimism radiated, not just from those who thought Canada shouldn’t host a Men’s World Cup, but also from many who considered a bid win implausible.

“A guy from the Toronto Star interviewed me four months after I became president of Canada Soccer,” recalls Montagliani. “I said that we were going to be bidding for the World Cup and he writes in his article, ‘This guy is out of his mind, off his rocker.’ And that’s the one thing we always lack in this country with sports—we never think big. I always hear, ‘That’s not how we do things in Canada.’ To me, that’s an excuse, not some badge of honour. Get your head down and work, like every immigrant that came here. Don’t use your passport as an excuse, which we do too often.”

Once Montagliani went to work, he realized that it made a lot of sense to approach U.S. Soccer, which had bid multiple times unsuccessfully, about hosting the tournament together. “[Then-U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati] goes, ‘Why do I need Canada?’ says Montagliani. “I said, ‘You just lost the last two bids, got your ass kicked. And you’re going to lose again—in fact, we’ll beat you. You know why? Because [the other FIFA nations] don’t care about stadiums or money. They care about how you make them feel. And they hate your guts, dude.’”

Montagliani laughs. “I said those words. Was it true? Maybe not, but I said them to make a point—and to make it clear that they could risk 100 percent of it in a bid again, or we could share it and they’d get the bulk of the games anyway, because they have more infrastructure. And he’s a good buddy of mine; that’s why I can say those words.”

He also courted Mexico because, as he told the U.S. Soccer president, “if we can put maple syrup and churros on your attitude, we’ll win.”

Montagliani, who is now one of eight FIFA vice-presidents, was pretty confident in the bid but didn’t take any chances, travelling with the North American delegation to 200 federations. “We didn’t have to build anything because all the stadiums were there,” he says. “Also, with the U.S. market, we knew we’d generate more revenue than any other location. And finally, especially when it comes to Canada and the U.S., so many people in those 200 countries have relatives in those places. That cultural, coming home aspect was big.”

On the world stage

On May 27, 2015, three years into his role with Canada Soccer, Montagliani was in a hotel room in Zurich. The phone rang at 6 a.m. It was Gulati. “He says, ‘Victor, turn on CNN right now,’” Montagliani remembers. “At a different hotel where all the FIFA executives are, you see sheets covering the windows on TV. I go down there and by that time, they’re all gone.”

Authorities arrested 14 officials, nine of whom were FIFA executives, on charges of wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering. Among the officials were the president of CONCACAF and two of his predecessors.

“The lawyer for CONCACAF calls a meeting of all the 41 member associations,” says Montagliani. “And [he] says, ‘We have to constitute an emergency committee of three people to run the organization.’ I’ll never forget, the president of Jamaica  at the time, Horace Burrell, god rest his soul, makes this big speech. He says,  ‘We have to change the face of the organization. And I think Victor should be appointed!’ What? Me?”

Montagliani chaired the emergency committee for a year. “No one wanted to deal with us, no banks, no one,” he says. In 2016, when an election for president of CONCACAF was called, Montagliani ran against two competitors. “Like anything, when I decide to go, I go. I campaigned on my own dime for three months, went to see all 41 countries, from the U.S. to Bonaire, a little island off Venezuela.”

He won. And, maybe fittingly, the guy who gets compared to Tony Soprano actually had to clean up the corruption. “I inherited a confederation that was financially, morally and football bankrupt; it had lost a lot of cred,” he says. “Especially on the women’s side, it was really bad.”

These days, the federation sees around 1,000 games a year, has what Montagliani calls a “robust women’s program” and rakes in hundreds of millions in revenue. Montagliani gives credit to the team he hired, as well as a strategy called One CONCACAF. “The past leadership was divisive; they pitted everyone against each other,” he says. “We’re 41 nations, but we’re one. Our logo is a circle. And every decision we make is based on what’s best for the game.”

Full circle

Montagliani now lives in West Vancouver—when he’s not travelling some 200 days of the year—with his wife. The couple have two adult daughters. But he hasn’t forgotten where he comes from. When photographer Blasberg tells him to look up into the top corner of the net at Garden Park for an angle, he quickly replies, “Oh buddy, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that corner.”

The tight circle of friends and colleagues he had when he used to hang around here is still very much a part of his life. “I’ll pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey Victor, have you got time for coffee?’ And he’ll always make it happen,” says Crescenzo, who founded the East End Boys Club to help at-risk East Vancouver youth. Part of Crescenzo’s job is fundraising for the club. “It’s hard to ask people you know for money. With him, I say, ‘Here’s all the work we’re doing, I’m looking for 10 people to provide me with X amount of dollars so we can get the kids a meal every Wednesday.’ He’ll say, ‘Okay, I’ll double it.’ He cares about the community.”

Iuele has been to multiple global events with Montagliani—including watching Brazilian star Ronaldinho bow down to him at a legends game thanks to his free-kick prowess—but one particular World Cup draw stands out.

“[Argentinian soccer icon Diego] Maradona is on stage. And [Brazilian soccer legend] Pele comes in on a wheelchair—he’s just had hip surgery,” Iuele recalls. “Maradona sees Vic; he says, ‘Hey papi!’ He jumps off the stage while Vic is starting to talk to Pele. Maradona comes and hugs Vic around the waist while Vic is kissing Pele on the head. I’m 50 feet away and I’m crying. Nobody in Canada understands this man. He’s got two of the greatest soccer players in the world who absolutely adore him. He’s so well-known around the world, it’s kind of funny that when you come to Vancouver nobody knows who he is.”

That might change when FIFA comes to town and Montagliani inevitably is more exposed to media and fans everywhere. After all, he thinks the games will be like nothing the town has ever seen: “I know 2010 was great… but with all due respect, it’s not even close. It’ll be way bigger.”

But if his image in his home country and town doesn’t change, it seems like that would be just fine with the man himself. “Leadership is about service, not power,” he says. “That’s my family’s motto. My parents never said those words, but I saw them. I lived them.”