Snubbed by U.S., Jesse Marsch marches Canada into the World Cup on a mission - ESPN

When Jesse Marsch, the coach of the Canadian men's soccer team, walked into a news conference on a February morning in 2025, almost nobody was expecting the news. It was just another pre-tournament conference designed to gin up publicity for an event.

Coaches and officials representing the Concacaf Nations League semifinalists were gathered at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, California. The chatter was all soccer and soccer-adjacent: the difficulties of attracting players from European clubs during the international window, and how the games in Southern California should give Mexico an advantage.

But as the session was winding down, someone asked Marsch, an American, how he felt coaching Canada «with all this political stuff going on right now.»

Political stuff? That was a polite way of referring to Donald Trump's insistence that Canada should become part of the United States, one of the early obsessions in his second term.

«I feel they have to become a state,» Trump said. «They need our protection.» Earlier, Trump had even referred to Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, as «Governor Carney.»

Marsch was ready when the question came. The only American coaching a team in this summer's World Cup, he had been waiting for it since he had arrived at Sofi that morning. He had also been waiting for the moment, or one like it, for much of his professional life.

Marsch's coaching career has increasingly been driven by a quest for meaning, something more profound than player movements diagrammed on a whiteboard. That was one reason he turned down opportunities to manage clubs in top European leagues and chose Canada instead. «My ambition used to be, can I get to the highest level?» he says. «And the higher I went, the fewer things