September 28, 2024

Newfoundland and Labrador's Unlikely Foray Into England's Soccer Scene

	By Ian Austen

This week, my colleague Rory Smith used his soccer expertise to look at the sport's contribution to fashion. Specifically, he reported that vintage soccer jerseys have become popular street wear and that buying and selling them has turned into a major business.

A Barrow player walking on the field in a yellow and black striped jersey with the words

Barrow's players will carry Newfoundland and Labrador's name on their jerseys for two seasons. Andrew Couldridge/Reuters

Rory's surprise appearance within the Styles section of The New York Times coincided with a surprising contribution by Newfoundland and Labrador to the world of soccer jerseys.

[Read: A Moment in Time, Preserved in Polyester]

The province is spending 171,000 Canadian dollars to put its name, a maple leaf and a web address on the jerseys of Barrow A.F.C., the team of Barrow-in-Furness on the west coast of England, for two years.

If you've never heard of Barrow, you're not alone.

"Even football fans in the U.K. would find it hard to name a single Barrow player or even place it on the map," Tariq Panja, the Times global sports reporter, told me in an email.

Barrow plays at the fourth, and lowest, level of professional soccer in England.

"Barrow is by pretty much any definition a small-market team — tiny town, miles away from anywhere (by British standards, probably not by Newfoundland and Labrador standards), only relatively recently in the league, very little historical imprint on soccer," Rory said by email.

But when the province announced the sponsorship arrangement in June, it emphasized that Barrow had the potential to deliver Newfoundland and Labrador's name to a vast audience through television and streaming services.

"The truly global audience that professional English football has achieved will allow Newfoundland and Labrador to be promoted and featured to millions of viewers as a welcoming place to live and work on an incredible level," Gerry Byrne, then the minister responsible for immigration and population growth, said in his announcement.

While English football as a whole does have an audience measured in the millions, most of that attention is focused on the top-level Premier League teams.

Generally, Rory wrote, "there's very little reason to stream Barrow's games."

[Sign up for the On Soccer With Rory Smith newsletter]

This week, however, the team's profile got a bit of a boost. The early rounds of England's Carabao Cup competition, which includes teams at all levels, brought humble Barrow up against Chelsea, one of the best-funded, best-known teams in the Premier League. (The result was a 5-0 blowout win for Chelsea.)

But even Chelsea's might, Tariq said, did not mean that the match had much of an audience.

He said that major clubs like Chelsea usually deploy their second-string players for the Carabao Cup, which ranks below the much better-known F.A. Cup, diminishing viewer interest. And this week's game competed for viewers with regular-season matches between top-level clubs. Tariq estimated that the audience for the Chelsea-Barrow match was in "the tens of thousands."

Newfoundland and Labrador isn't trying to lure tourists with the Barrow sponsorship (as it is with the sumptuously photographed television commercials it runs in Canada). Rather, the province is hoping to persuade skilled workers in fields like health care to move there.

Two Barrow players wearing the new Newfoundland and Labrador jersey vie for the ball with a Chelsea player wearing a blue jersey.

Newfoundland and Labrador hopes its name on Barrow's jersey will attract skilled immigrants to the province. Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Sarah Stoodley, the province's current immigration minister, told me on a video call from near Oxford, England, that her department had focused on Britain as a source of workers since it tightened immigration under Brexit.

(Ms. Stoodley wore a Barrow home jersey during the call. Perhaps appropriately for a sport that frequently involves diving, it features a repeated pattern of submarine silhouettes. A shipyard in the town builds the vessels, including nuclear-powered ones.)

"There are a lot of people in the U.K., my understanding is, who have to leave," she said. "We're really hoping to capitalize on that to say, 'You may not have heard of Newfoundland and Labrador, but we're here and we want you.'"

While she was not involved in the sponsorship decision, Ms. Stoodley said that public servants had come up with the "unusual tactic" of sponsoring a British soccer club. Several clubs were contacted before a deal with Barrow was reached.

As for its effect so far, a spokesman for Barrow told me that jersey sales had increased.

Ms. Stoodley noted that the BBC had run two articles about the sponsorship before the Chelsea game. (One of them described traveling to Barrow to watch a game as "a trip to the end of the line" of English soccer.) And she said that visits to the website now promoted by Barrow's players, HomeAwaits.ca, had risen after the Chelsea match, to 58,000 a day, up from between 50,000 and 55,000.

"It's value for money, right?" she told me. "We have a multimillion-dollar immigration marketing budget, and our investment with Barrow is 171,000 dollars over two years. So a very small drop in the bucket."

Ms. Stoodley did not attend the Chelsea game, but she has been visiting a series of job fairs Newfoundland and Labrador is holding in England. Her department is also holding job fairs in Mexico to recruit residential construction workers, she said.

I asked if the province planned to sponsor a soccer club in Mexico, another nation where the sport looms large.

"Absolutely not," she said, before adding: "Not absolutely not. But that's not on the plate right now."

Trans Canada

Justin Trudeau, standing among several other people on the street, smiles toward the camera.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the CBS studio in New York this week. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government met expectations and survived two confidence votes in the House of Commons this week, the prognosis for his Liberal Party in the next election appears grim. Matina Stevis-Gridneff, The Times's new Canada bureau chief, has looked into why Canadians turned on the prime minister. "Mr. Trudeau's most serious liability could be that he has been in power for too long and that he has lost the ability to market one of his most distinctive attributes: optimism," she writes.
Using a cab cut from a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee, the engine from a 1985 Toyota Celica, 107 hand-sewn rubber segments and no blueprints, Robert Tymofichuk, a teacher in Myrnam, Alberta, has created his own hovercraft.
A new exhibition at the 164-year-old Montreal Museum of Fine Arts aims to reset the museum's relationship with Indigenous people and their art, Christy Choi writes.
Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong reported on a group in Halifax that is trying to mitigate global warming by turning rivers and oceans into atmospheric sponges to pull carbon dioxide from the air, using a technique first developed to offset acid rain.
Canada, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands said this week that they would take the Taliban to the U.N.'s highest court because of its harsh restrictions on Afghan women.
From The Athletic: Christine Sinclair, the Canadian who is soccer's career leading international goal scorer, said she would retire from professional soccer at the end of the season.
Pop Montreal will hold tribute concerts on Sept. 29 and 30 to honor the memory of Lhasa de Sela, the American-born multilingual singer-songwriter who died of breast cancer in 2010. Her work, which blends Romani music, Mexican rancheras, Portuguese fados, Americana, chansons française and South American ballads, was particularly popular in Quebec.

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen is based in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for two decades. Follow him on Bluesky at @ianausten.bsky.social.

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