CHARLOTTE, NC — In the spring of 2024, Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue and former Canada national-team forward Tosaint Ricketts needed to call Atiba Hutchinson, arguably the best men’s Canadian player ever, to get his opinion.Blue led a search committee, including Ricketts and Hutchinson, to find the next head coach of Canada’s men’s national team. They thought they had their guy in Jesse Marsch, then an energetic coach with plenty of experience, looking to make an impact in Canada. But it was going to cost them. More than Canada Soccer could afford on its own at the time.Hutchinson’s voice as a recently-retired player mattered. He understood what the national team needed. What should Blue and Canada Soccer do about Marsch?Ricketts remembers the enthusiasm in his reply.“Break the bank!” Hutchinson shouted over the phone.After watching him interview for the Canada job, Hutchinson was one of many who were convinced Marsch’s energy and experience would change Canada’s trajectory. He was right. Once Canada Soccer raised enough money for his salary through private donors, Marsch took the team to their highest FIFA ranking ever (26th), as well as a Copa America semifinal.And now, even without any results in the World Cup that Marsch was first hired to coach, Canada Soccer has again opened its chequebook and gone to enough donors to keep him around.“The way he talked, his ideology, his identity, what he wanted from the players, what he knew about the group, it was the perfect fit for our player pool, our roster,” Ricketts tells The Athletic. “It was one of the first times since retiring when I said, ‘Man, why am I retired?’. I would have flourished in Jesse’s philosophy.”Canada and Marsch formally agreed on an extension through the 2030 World Cup finals late on Monday, ending months of speculation over whether he would re-sign. It came on the same day Canada formally opened their pre-World Cup training camp, when Marsch answered questions largely about the tournament itself.Marsch and Canada simply make too much sense together to wait for results to play out. Talk of an extension between the two parties began last year and has continued. The 52-year-old American has long expressed his desire to continue as head coach.His goal in the coming weeks is for Canada’s men to advance from a World Cup’s group stage for the first time. But he hasn’t done that yet. And so the most pressing question that will get asked is why extend Marsch before a World Cup in which, theoretically, Canada could go 0-3 and suffer early elimination?But relying on that question alone to assess his future lacks understanding of soccer in Canada.Regardless of this World Cup, Marsch is exactly what this Canadian team needs right now. Re-signing him provides exactly the stability Canada need before the biggest men’s tournament in their soccer history.Yes, Canada deserve the pressure that comes from being one of the three co-host nations. And yes, they should rightfully be expected to grab their first win at a World Cup and get out of a group also containing Bosnia & Herzegovina, Qatar and Switzerland.The results in this World Cup alone will not change the fact that Canada is a growing soccer nation. They might be able to beat the United States or Mexico on a given day, but soccer is far more deeply entrenched in those two nations than it is in Canada.As much as winning World Cup games this summer could catapult soccer into a different stratosphere in the country, Canada Soccer has to take a big-picture view regarding the growth of the sport. That it would lock up Marsch before the World Cup suggests the people in charge rightly have one eye on the future.Marsch’s brand of full-throttle, Red Bull club stable-inspired soccer has turned enough heads in Canada. More and more people within the game there see it as an approach that can be harnessed with a comprehensive, top-down model. There is increasing belief throughout Canada Soccer that Marsch’s style can work not just with the men’s national team, but with the country’s youth sides and perhaps beyond.Many top nations around the world have a playing philosophy that is ingrained in their domestic soccer culture. Their young players learn that as they develop, and so are better prepared to be effective at senior level. Canada, by contrast, have never had a truly effective top-down style of playing. Canada Soccer would have needed someone who would take more than just two years to implement that.By giving Marsch four more, Canada might finally have a legitimate answer to a question they’ve long and uncomfortably avoided: What do great Canadian teams look like?Marsch has got the best out of Canada’s players over his two years in charge. (AP Photo / Tony Gutierrez)There is great synergy between Marsch’s style and Canada’s player pool now, as well as what is coming down the ’pike for the future.When Marsch originally interviewed for the job, he outlined how Canadian children don’t grow up with a soccer ball at their feet the way kids in, say, Argentina and Germany do. As a result, he identified, Canada’s players may lack the technical skills many of their national-team contemporaries around the world have.What Canada does have, Marsch also identified, is world-class athletic facilities. Canadians were becoming athletes — very good ones — at a young age, and he saw that in the country’s best players. And he has further seen that speed and physicality are evident in Canada’s better teenage players, too.Marsch wants his team to get younger. He touted on Monday how the average age of Canada’s side at this World Cup would drop by two years compared to the 2022 edition.Canada is still generations away from seeing its players develop wide-scale technical abilities. So it’s best to harness the qualities evident in their current and future talent pool in a style of play that can be deployed now, and for the years ahead. In re-signing Marsch, Canada Soccer is acknowledging there is growth within this team still to come. That kind of long-term planning should reassure fans.For Marsch, an extension makes perfect sense. He effectively has full control over how his team play, and who is in it. There is no owner to answer to. That control allows him the chance to truly change how Canadians play. Marsch will work in tandem, not under, recently hired sporting director Kenneth Heiner-Moller to determine how his team will operate on the field.Canada Soccer has identified a synergy and, frankly, happiness between Marsch and the organization it has rarely enjoyed with a head coach. Marsch might be just 52 but this feels like the last coaching job he might ever have. He really is that content with being in Canada and building this team and project.By signing an extension, Marsch has made it clear he is not using coaching Canada at the 2026 World Cup as a stepping stone to greater things. He’s already coached bigger teams. Buying into this Canadian side long-term should bolster his players’ confidence ahead of a tournament now barely two weeks away.For years beforehand, Canada Soccer was never far away from turmoil and drama within its national team. Nobody in Canada wants to go back to the days of the head coach calling out the organization for lack of funding after a Nations League finals loss, as John Herdman did in 2023.Marsch has changed that. There is a sense of professionalism and positivity in Canadian camps that didn’t exist before. Why wait to see if Canada get a few kind bounces in those three group-stage games to determine if he should stick around?Sure, this extension also puts pressure on Marsch to succeed. But he’s been in high-pressure situations before: coaching in the Premier League and the Champions League is not something every international manager has on their resume. But he does. Finding another coach with his qualifications wouldn’t be easy for Canada.And in Marsch, Canada Soccer has been thrilled to see how being near the top of the coaching mountain — which he has been — means he emanates calm and confidence in otherwise stressful situations.Canadian players need that. They will tell you how nervous they were before playing world champions Argentina in their 2024 Copa America opener. That is, until Marsch spoke. He flipped their thought process on its head. He told them they had every chance of winning that game. Marsch himself had toppled big opponents, too. There was no panic, only confidence in his voice.Canada might have lost that day, 2-0, but they outplayed Argentina at times to begin what was a whirlwind tournament. The team looked different under Marsch. The process mattered more than the result.This summer and beyond, that process will continue to matter to Marsch and Canada Soccer in new ways.“We have one of the most athletic teams in the world,” Ricketts said. “We’re hard workers. But Jesse just brought that confidence, that swagger, and he knew that he wasn’t going to recreate the Canadian player. He wanted to take our strengths and basically f–k teams up. That’s what he does.”