'I don't see the same club': Joey Saputo weighs in on CF Montréal's struggles, club future
It’s been an eventful couple of days for CF Montréal.
To begin the week, they made the shock decision to sack head coach Laurent Courtois just five games into the MLS season, becoming the first MLS team to relieve their coach of their duties in 2025.
Despite being very early into his second season with Montréal, the club felt they needed a change in direction, having started the year with just one point from those first five games. Even if the club had been yet to play a home game, and were still waiting on some prominent offseason acquisitions to make their debut, they were ready for a change, and made it.
In the aftermath of that decision, former player Marco Donadel has since stepped up as interim head coach, becoming the club’s fifth coach in the past five seasons, and 11th in their MLS history.
Le CF Montréal démet de ses fonctions Laurent Courtois >>> https://t.co/BNJBUqoQPU
— CF Montréal (@cfmontreal) March 24, 2025
CF Montréal parts ways with Laurent Courtois >>> https://t.co/B00TnIlNut#CFMTL pic.twitter.com/ZhVsgysrkS
For a Montréal team that has had an up-and-down last five years, they’ll hope this can help them find some stability, as they look to get back on track in terms of their sporting project.
Speaking of that project, Courtois’ firing wasn’t the only big news of the week out of Montréal, as their owner, Joey Saputo, made a rare public appearance in Canadian media, speaking to OMNI in an exclusive interview in Italian.
There, Saputo, who also is the chairman and majority shareholder of Serie A side Bologna, spoke a lot of the success of Bologna, but also took the time to talk about the Montréal side he founded over three decades ago.
Once an active presence around the club, that has changed over the last six years, starting when he stepped down as club president in 2019, as he became less present in the day-to-day operations. That didn’t mean he didn’t make appearances in Montréal - most notably in 2022 when he had a run-in with then head coach Wilfried Nancy - but he has mostly focused his attention on Bologna, who reached the UEFA Champions League in a monumental achievement last year, and look on track to do so again this year.
Having had the chance to reflect on his move from being more involved with Montréal to shifting that focus to Bologna, he has some regrets on what has happened with the club since, noting that he feels it lacks the passion it once had when he was around.
"Now that I look back, maybe it was a mistake to detach (from Montréal)" Saputo told OMNI in Italian.
"Here, my problem is that I was too passionate, and I was criticized, so I said I’d leave and let the others do things, and that was a mistake, a huge mistake,” he continued. “When I see where the club is today, there is no longer that culture that was there when I was. One thing you have to understand with CF Montréal is that I created it 30 years ago, and when it was time to work, I worked because it was my passion.
"When we started and there were 500 fans in the stands, I always thought we could become an important club in North America, and we got there, but it makes me sad that I don’t see the same club as when I left it, and I see the difference with where we are with Bologna."
Having felt pressure to depart Montréal due to that passion, which many would argue doubled as meddling, Saputo has felt that has not been a problem at Bologna, where he sees that passion that he once felt in Montréal shine through in many ways.
"Our strength (with Bologna) is the feeling of belonging, they want to work for the good of the club, here, there is not that at CF Montréal," he offered.
He added: "People there appreciate our work... here they don’t appreciate our work."
🇮🇹 Joey Saputo sur Omni Television 🇨🇦
— sofianebenzaza (@sofianebenzaza) March 27, 2025
- Sur le futur de la MLS / On the future of MLS
- La réalité 💸 du #CFMTL / #CFMTL reality check
- The Bologna market vs Montréal market#MLS #WeAreOne
Crédit 📺Omni Television pic.twitter.com/geSVR60SQR
Despite that, Saputo remains bullish on CF Montréal’s future, noting that he strongly believes in what MLS is building.
Even if he notes that it’ll be hard for his club to keep up with some of the changes as they deal with their own struggles, he feels it’ll be exactly what’s needed to capitalize on the momentum of the 2026 World Cup that will be held in North America next summer.
Among the struggles he spoke of? A lack of ticket revenue due to pricing and stadium sizes, struggles in attracting sponsors, and other negative financial factors contributed to the club losing “$20 million dollars a year”, in his words.
Because of that, he’s pushed the club to become more of a selling club in recent years, with the goal being to reinvest that money into the squad. The club has had mixed success in that result - the sales of Djordje Mihailovic, Alistair Johnston and Ismaël Koné for nearly $20 million in the winter of 2022-2023 were seen as a big boost, but sales of a similar ilk haven’t followed, something they hope changes soon.
"I’m someone who believes a lot in the future of MLS, and where it wants to get to. Now, with the World Cup coming, there will be a lot of support for North American soccer,” Saputo noted. “There will be changes in the rules that will help the league grow, there will be things that perhaps hurt some teams, but I look at MLS as a whole… These rules will give us credibility at the international level, but we must also be credible locally, and the changes will give us the chance to buy and sell players for the future of the club."
"The people here must give us time to put things in place and to keep growing, as this league has an incredible future, and we have to take advantage of the situation for 2026."
Whether you like #CFMTL’s current project and sporting philosophy or not, if you can’t look at this and respect that their fingerprints are all over the best #CanMNT side ever, then I don’t know what to tell you. https://t.co/qhnGq3Mwq6
— elias™ (@theegrigoriadis) February 24, 2025
As a result, the club remains committed to that goal of being a development factory - they’ve continued to promote local and other Canadian talents up to the first team in recent seasons, while making a point of attracting young players from around MLS.
Now, the goal will be to get back to what they showed in 2022, where they were one of the top teams in MLS despite having a young group, which led to the sales of Mihailovic, Johnston and Koné. Unfortunately, with the departure of Nancy after that season, they weren’t able to build the continuity hoped, and they’ll look to find that in the wake of the post-Courtois era, which will begin this weekend with an away match in Chicago.
Until then, Saputo’s rare appearance will certainly get many talking, as some will wonder if this is a sign he wants to play a more active role in the club once again, helping reinvigorate them at a key period.
