The 2025 Canadian Premier League season kicks off April 5, as Canada’s top-flight domestic league enters its seventh season.

In the lead-up to matchday one, we at CanPL.ca will have all you need to know about each of the league’s eight clubs. To see every CPL team’s season preview, click here.

It’s going to be a big summer on the west coast for Vancouver FC, as the Canadian Premier League’s newest team is getting set for their third season, where they look ready to hit a crucial inflection point in their development as a club.

After two years filled with the typical highs and lows that come with putting together an expansion team, they feel ready to take a big step this season. After flirting with making the playoffs in 2024, the goal is simple in 2025: get over the bar and reach the postseason for the first time in their history. 

When looking at Afshin Ghotbi’s side, they’ve got experienced winners who will know how to make that kind of jump, and they have surrounded them with hungry players eager to prove themselves. Now, the goal will be to put that together into a winning recipe, one that can help the club take that next step. 

As a result, the mission statement is simple for Vancouver in 2025: This is hoped to be the year where the Eagles can soar. 

Story of 2024

• 2024 CPL regular season record (W-D-L): 7-9-12 (30 pts, 7th place)
• Goals scored: 29
• Goals against: 43
• Goal difference: -14
• Top scorer: Alejandro Díaz (10)
• Canadian Championship: Lost in the preliminary round to Cavalry FC

In the end, 2024 represented a year of progress for Vancouver on paper, as they improved on their 2023 totals in goals for, goals against, goal difference, and points. 

Unfortunately, that didn’t lead to the gains they hoped for in the table, as they finished seventh for a second straight season, missing the playoffs by four points. 

Plus, while they progressed on paper, their end to the campaign left a sour taste in their mouth – they failed to win any of their last eight matches, losing four and drawing four of those matches. Given how close they were to the playoff line, a byproduct of a strong start to the season, one can only imagine how valuable a couple of victories could’ve been late on. 

Yet, after ending 2023 on a strong note after a slow start, and then flipping that script in 2024, it shows a big goal in 2025 will be to find more consistency, which can make a huge difference for teams looking to make the postseason. 

Arrivals and Departures

It’s been a busy offseason for Vancouver, who moved some promising youngsters onto the next level while saying goodbye to several key veterans, including a couple of day-one names. 

In particular, Rocco Romeo, Kadin Chung, and Gabriel Bitar are three of those day-one names who will be missed, with each providing important leadership in their respective positions over the past two seasons. 

To replace them, however, Vancouver have done well to bring in a couple of former CPL champions, as Kunle Dada-Luke and Terran Campbell have arrived from Pacific and Forge, respectively, giving this group more winning pedigree to rely upon. 

Given Dada-Luke’s ability to cover ground down the flank, he’ll play a big role in replacing Chung and James Cameron, while Campbell is a big addition given his status as the CPL’s all-time top scorer, especially when seeing that he’ll pair with the second player on that list and his former teammate, Alejandro Díaz, who he’s had success with in the past. 

Otherwise, youngsters Emrick Fotsing and Kevin Podgorni will hope to make a similar impact to the one made by Grady McDonnell, who made the jump to Club Brugge after a strong debut campaign with the Eagles as a 16-year-old, a move that likely caught the eye of Fotsing and Podgorni. Vancouver hasn’t been shy in playing youngsters if they deserve it, so look for them to try and earn valuable minutes as the year goes on. 

The same goes for Vancouver’s U-SPORTS draft picks, Mehdi Essoussi and Henri Godbout, who will also look to play prominent roles in their debut campaigns.

2025 Outlook

The mission is simple for Vancouver: after two solid debut seasons, take a big step forward this season. 

Because of that, the goal is straightforward: to make the playoffs. To do that, however, the path forward is less direct. First, they must score more goals, and do so consistently (they scored two or more goals in a game just nine times in 2024), but they must also be tidier defensively, (they kept just five clean sheets in 2024), having led the CPL in goals against in both of their seasons as a club. 

Plus, more specifically, their home form is also going to be a big point of scrutiny – they nabbed a league-low 16 points from 14 home matches (their 0-0 draw with Cavalry FC in Kelowna included), winning just one of their last nine matches at Willoughby Community Park in 2025. For a team that has to deal with a lot of travel due to their geographical location, picking up more home points is a must. 

Otherwise, some more success in the Canadian Championship would be considered a nice bonus. So far, their two entries in that tournament have yielded the same result – they lost 1-0 on the road to York United in the 2023 preliminary round, before falling 1-0 on the road to Cavalry in the same round in 2024. With a date away against a Pacific FC side they’ve had a good record against in this year’s preliminary round, they’ll look to win their first Canadian Championship victory, giving them momentum they could potentially use in CPL play. 

Lastly, with some of the key departures, head coach Afshin Ghotbi will face a big challenge in terms of establishing an identity for his team. A team that often played at their best when sitting deeper and hitting on the counter-attack, he’ll have to see if that’ll be the best way to move forward, or if there is another system that can help give the team more balance at both ends of the field. Having had two years to work with his team to develop chemistry while building up a roster, this third year will be all about turning that process into tangible results, helping show the fruit of the hard work done over the past few seasons. 

What they’re saying

“I think learning never stops, and we’re always learning. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. I feel that we are constantly trying to evolve as an organization, and we’re challenging every person in the organization to challenge themselves to be a better version of themselves every day that they’re with us. Often, a third season is a season that you break out, and we were maybe a game away last year from making the playoffs, but, personally, that’s not the only measure of success for me, there are bigger and more ambitious goals that I want to set for our club. I do believe that the CPL should be a league for young Canadian players who have international aspirations, it should be the league where we bring in teenagers, surround them with a few veterans, and create a team that can produce national team players for Canada in the coming years. We’ve already started to do that, we’re very close, so how do we now also consistently perform and win games? That’s what I’ve been challenging our group to find, that consistency, to bring a certain standard in every training and in every game that we play.” – Afshin Ghotbi, head coach

“We have a good mix of veteran players and young guys, and the young guys are stepping up. They’re learning to play and train like pros (…) right now, the energy has been great, and hopefully, during the season, we can still build that up even more. You can feel the atmosphere that everyone’s settled, and we’ll play with more confidence because of that” – Alejandro Díaz, forward

Projected XI

(4-4-2) Irving; Dada-Luke, Campagna, Enyou, Gee; Bah, Fry, Norman Jr, Cantave; Díaz, Campbell

When looking at this potential lineup, one can’t help but look at the experience littered across the pitch. Between Callum Irving, Kunle Dada-Luke, Alejandro Díaz, and Terran Campbell, they’ve got four former CPL champions, and with the likes of Paris Gee and Mikaël Cantave, they’ve got other players who know the league well. 

Now, the big challenge will be to build chemistry — especially in midfield, where Vancouver’s going to be looking for some big contributions from some new players and youngsters. 

Where they can look for familiarity, however, is at the back, where Irving will look to put in another big campaign after a solid 2024 outing, helping organize those in front of him, which includes returnees such as Gee, Allan Enyou and Matteo Campagna. 

Then, up front, the partnership of Díaz and Campbell will look to emulate past success, with the goal being to replicate something like the 2021 season, where they led Pacific FC to a playoff title while sharing the goalscoring responsibilities. With over 75 CPL goals between them in their careers (regular season and playoffs), supplying them with chances will be the goal for their teammates, as they’ve more than proven that they’ll take their chances when it comes down to it. If Vancouver can do that, there’s no doubt that these two will cause lots of headaches for opposing defenders this season, helping shore up the team’s attack. 

Roster notes