Perhaps no club in the Canadian Premier League will be more eager to put 2023 behind them than Valour FC.

For the first time since the spring season in the league’s inaugural 2019 season, the Winnipeg club finished at the bottom of the CPL table. Last season saw them collect the fewest wins (six), goals (25) and points (26) in club history.

As the probability of reaching the postseason trickled away, head coach Phillip Dos Santos and his staff began the process of taking an honest evaluation of their team. It has resulted in an off-season of change for Valour, who have been getting their business done early as no club in the CPL has seen more roster turnover as the calendar flips to 2024.

“I think that we owe something to our fans, that’s undeniable,” Dos Santos told CanPL.ca earlier this week. “It’s something that we have the chip on our shoulders; we felt that it was tight games, it was not taking care of opportunities that we had created early in games and a lot of those losses or draws could’ve been converted into wins. But football is not about what could have been, it’s about what is and there were far too many decisive moments we didn’t deal well with.”

While Valour ultimately missed the playoffs by 12 points, the margins were smaller than they might seem. The Winnipeg side dropped points in 16 matches that were decided by a goal or less (eight draws, plus eight one-goal losses). In a league with as much parity as the Canadian Premier League, rebuilds can be done incredibly quickly, and Valour will be looking to follow in the footsteps of the Halifax Wanderers of 2023 (seventh in 2022 to third the year after), or Atlético Ottawa of 2022 (worst to first in the table) this coming season.

As it stands, only eight players have been announced as returning from last year’s Valour squad, with 14 confirmed departures — including star midfielder Diego Gutiérrez and 2023 Best U-21 Canadian Player Matteo de Brienne. The club has already announced five new signings for 2024: Australian defender Tass Mourdoukoutas, fullback Roberto Alarcón, midfielders Jordan Faria and Zachary Sukunda and forward Shaan Hundal.

Each of these five players, as well as 2024 CPL-U SPORTS Draft pick Frank Facchineri, have previously played in the league, combining for 130 matches of Canadian Premier League experience.

“These are players we got to see a lot and it gives any team a little bit more comfort when it comes to adaptation and the capacity to maintain levels of performance in a league that is extremely demanding and competitive,” said Dos Santos. “So when I’m talking about players like Shaan, when I’m talking about players like Tass, or Roberto, those are players that we had very early in the process identified as players that, if we had a chance, we would want to see them here, so the discussions started pretty early. … For us it gives us that security that they could come in and help the team immediately, and help us right away to have very high levels of performance from the beginning.” 

Hundal was an especially important target because of the team’s goalscoring deficiencies in 2023. Valour finished last in the league in that regard this past season, with just 25 scored in 28 matches. Hundal finished with six goals and an assist this past campaign with Vancouver FC, and was fourth in the league in expected goals with 8.37 suggesting that tally could have been even higher.

Valour had previously tried to sign the 24-year-old prior to last season, and again tried to acquire him during the summer months from Vancouver FC, but a move never materialized. After finally acquiring him in November, Valour now have a focal point for their attack heading into 2024.

“We look at the front line, again, for us it was a critical one,” said Dos Santos. “We needed to bring in players who have scored goals and change our ability to create, and that comes through sometimes the way you play or how you shape up the team in 2024, and the changes or adjustments you are going to make, but also in personnel and the team. I think that the team was oriented a lot to create through wide areas and that became a challenge for us; it was very hard to attack centrally and for us it’s about finding a balance that allows us to do both.”

Another player who could help ignite the attack is Owen Sheppard, whom Valour took first overall in the 2024 CPL-U SPORTS Draft out of Cape Breton University. Sheppard scored nine goals in 11 matches with the Capers last season. He was then named the top player at the national championship, which Cape Breton went on to win at home. Valour had sent assistant coach Daryl Fordyce to the event, and seeing the young attacker thrive under pressure gave Valour all the evidence they needed to make their selection.

“We feel that Owen became a no-brainer,” said Dos Santos. “He’s someone that could, just because of his athleticism and pace, get behind the opposition, make his way through and then it’s very hard to stop him.”

The Valour coach, meanwhile, sees similarities between his second-round draft selection, central defender Frank Facchineri, and new signing Jordan Faria. The two players, who spent time in the Vancouver Whitecaps and Toronto FC systems respectively, were once considered some of the top prospects in the country. Facchineri captained Canada at the 2019 U-17 World Cup in Brazil, while Faria was the runner-up for Canadian U-17 Player of the Year in 2017. Dos Santos worked with Facchineri with the Vancouver Whitecaps and saw first-hand all the hype that he received as a young player, and how he has had to manage those expectations since. He is banking on both players learning from the adversity they have faced in their path to the professional level, and believes both still have plenty of room to grow.

Beyond offence, one other area where the Winnipeg club will look to improve in 2024 significantly is their home form. To start the 2023 season, Valour were in the midst of an incredible run at home, as they went undefeated in their first six matches at IG Field, extending a streak of 13 straight matches undefeated at home that stretched back to July 30, 2022. When that run of nearly a year was ended, on Canada Day 2023 in a 2-0 loss to CPL Shield winners Cavalry, Dos Santos said the wheels fell off.

Valour lost all but one of their final eight matches at IG Field, with seven losses that matched the number of times they were defeated at home in 2021 and 2022 combined. They finished the season with a league-low three wins at home, the fewest in club history. Turning the ground back into the difficult away date that it has been for the better part of Dos Santos’s time with Valour is a critical aspect of the club rebounding in 2024.

“We absolutely need to get it right,” said Dos Santos. “It’s such an important base, you look at a team like Halifax who made home a very difficult place to go into and play, they nearly maximized points there and that’s why they finished so high in the standings. Home is vital for any team in any sport and we can’t deny that. That will come as you win, you’ll get closer to your fans. It’s just how sports works, so for us winning at home is a must.” 

As he enters his third full season in charge of Valour, Dos Santos is still chasing that winning feeling — and his desire to accomplish something special with this club. That is what motivated him to sign on for another year.

“I had no other choice,” said Dos Santos. “For me, there was nothing more in my mind because I just feel I owe a lot to the club. Yeah, it’s good for a coach to say, ‘I need one more year,’ or ‘I need time,’ but when I took this project with two years and ten games left, without promising people anything, I felt that I would be able to achieve more than I did. So when the club came to me and gave me their vote of confidence for another season, for me it was one of those where I felt the desire, but also the need and the obligation to stick to it. Because I really want to bring something special to this city, to our fans, to the club.”

The work to make that happen is already well underway.