Journalist Han Bing reported that veteran Hutchinsons can bring valuable experience and authority to the Canadian national team's locker room, but the take-off of Canadian football needs supernovae representing the future. Bayern's Alfonso Davis and Lille's Jonathan David, twin stars, have a crucial idol effect on the progress of Canadian football. After all, before them, Canadian players had never touched a european top five league title.
The two "post-00s" supernovae not only helped Canada return to the World Cup after 36 years, but also became the image ambassador of Canadian football in the world. Alfonso is worth as much as 70 million euros, Jonathan David is also worth 50 million euros, and it is very likely that he will join the top five leagues this summer, making the whole of Europe look at Canadian football. What's more, the huge influence of the two supernovaes on and off the pitch can almost bring Canada a "golden age" for the next 10 years, which is one of the decisive factors for the sustainable development of Canadian football.
Liberia, a small and poor country in West Africa, has given birth to Africa's only Golden Globe winner, George Weah, and is also the greatest star in the country and even In Africa. But five years ago, despite personal lobbying by Viah, a former Liberian president, Liberia failed to make Alfonso Davis work for his home country. Born in November 2000 in a Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, the 21-year-old left-hand genius was born to parents who originally lived in monrovia, the country's capital, and fled to Ghana with 450,000 other refugees to escape the second Liberian civil war. Five years later, the family was resettled as refugees in Edmonton, Canada, where Alfonso began systematic football training.
Because of their refugee status, the Alfonso family could only maintain Their Liberian citizenship, but the Canadian Football Association discovered Alfonso's talent when he was 14 years old and spared no effort to try to naturalize him. In 2015, at the age of 14, Alfonso entered the echelon of the Vancouver Waves, and a year later won the youngest professional contract in the USL League. At that time, the Canadian Football Association continued to recruit Alfonso into the U15 national junior team and the U18 national youth team training camp, and in 2016, he was recruited under the age of 16 to the warm-up list of the U20 national youth team against the England national youth team. That same year, Alfonso was named Canada's U17 Player of the Year, which cleared the way for him to naturalize Canada.
In June 2017, Alfonso finally obtained Canadian citizenship and was temporarily added to the Canadian senior national team's squad against Curacao on the same day. Three weeks later, he was on the 23-man squad for the Central American Gold Cup, and the dust settled. The following year, Alfonso was bought by Bayern for $13.5 million + $8.5 million on floating terms, setting a record for the sale of players in major League Soccer in North America and proving the Canadian Football Association's unique vision. Today, Alfonso not only won the German and European football Grand Slam trophies (German Super League, German Cup, Bundesliga, Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup), but also the hottest supernova in the whole of North and Central America, and even overshadowed the American midfielder Pulisic who played for Chelsea.
Alfonso is fast, good in technology, strong in confrontation, can be competent in any position on the left side, and is a rare wing all-rounder. Many football latecomers rely on one or two superstars to achieve success, such as Haaland and Erdegaard Norway, Alaba's Austria, Mkhitaryan's Armenia, but Canada has Alfonso, plus the forward Jonathan David, enough to overwhelm the two hegemons in Central and North America, Mexico and the United States.
Moreover, the idol effect of Alfonso in the era of social networks is unimaginable. As coach Herdman put it, the generation of Canadian "post-00s" players led by Alfonso will bring Canadian football into the mainstream of young people's vision on social networks: "I have an 11-year-old daughter who has never had any interest in football, but she is very obsessed with watching videos that Alfonso shared on Tik-Tok. That's the power of an idol, who has built a large enough fan base for Canadian football, and fans are the future of football. ”
Jonathan David, who is also a "post-00s", was not born in Canada, he is Haitian, born in New York, USA, and returned to his home country of Haiti in only 3 months. It wasn't until the age of 6 that Jonathan immigrated to Canada with his parents and settled in Ottawa. However, because he came from French-speaking Haiti, he chose to attend the local French-speaking public school. Unlike Alfonso, who was trained by Major League Soccer, Jonathan David's childhood dream was to play in Europe, especially France.
He joined Belgian Ghent at the age of 18 and, after scoring 30 goals in 60 games, was bought by Lille for 30 million euros in the summer of 2020, becoming the canadian player with the highest transfer fee in history. Last season, with 13 Ligue 1 goals (11 of them in the second half of the New Year), he helped Lille beat Paris to win the Ligue 1 title, which was a sensation. It aroused widespread interest from giants and upstarts such as Paris Saint-Germain, Liverpool, Arsenal and Newcastle United, but Lille bit the reserve price of at least 70 million euros and also proved the strength of Jonathan David.
Jonathan David, 22, is the main scorer for the Canadian national team and has scored 20 goals in four years, just four goals away from the team's all-time goal record held by Larin. But he scored 24 goals in just 30 games, while Larin scored 24 goals in 50 games, significantly less efficient than the Haitian super scorer. Three years ago, Jonathan was already the winner of the Gold Boot of the Sino-American Gold Cup and the Golden Boot of the 2019/20 Season, and thus won the title of 2019 Canadian Footballer of the Year. In the World Cup qualifiers, he scored 5 goals and 4 assists in 14 games, as long as he participated in the goal, Canada could win, and the individual scores and assists were 21 points for Canada.
Alfonso and Jonathan are the rare talents that Canada has been fortunate to include, and they will also be the core of Canadian football's success in Central and North America and even the World Cup in the next 10 years. The path of immigration elite and naturalization they represent will naturally be a virtuous circle of sustainable development in Canadian football.