‘Together wins championships’: Marco Bustos returns to Pacific FC, sights set on trophies 🏆

It’s a reunion of sorts on Vancouver Island.

Pacific FC announced Friday that the club has signed Marco Bustos, bringing the ex-CPL superstar back to Langford after two years abroad with Swedish side IFK Värnamo.

The 28-year-old will be back at Starlight Stadium in 2025, hoping to pick up where he left off from his three prior seasons at Pacific. One thing is immediately clear about Bustos’ return: he’s coming back to win again.

“It’s super exciting to come back,” Bustos said this week. “It’s obviously a place that I know really well, and a place that I hold close to my heart, especially in my football career.

“It’s important for me to come back and compete. I don’t want to come back and be happy finishing in fifth, sixth place. That’s not my identity, my standard.”

After a 2024 season in which the Tridents scored just 27 times in 28 games, head coach James Merriman has enlisted a familiar face to bring his attack to life.

When Bustos left the CPL at the end of 2022, the Winnipeg native was fifth all-time in goals, and second on the league’s all-time assists leaderboard. Even to this day, he’s Pacific’s assists leader with 17 in his time there. Over four total CPL seasons (three with Pacific following a 2019 campaign with his hometown Valour FC), Bustos made 90 appearances in all competitions and contributed 23 goals, 20 assists.

During his last stint in the league, Bustos was a bona fide star, perhaps the most dangerous right winger in the CPL. He never did win an individual award — though his 2021 form might’ve earned him the Player of the Year nod had he not missed so much time to injury — but fans across the league knew his name and that he was an opponent to fear.

He was a key character in the best moments of Pacific FC’s history to date, from their 2021 CPL title, to deep runs in the Canadian Championship, to competing in the Concacaf League for the first time.

Unfortunately for Bustos, he wasn’t quite as ever-present in those moments as he wanted to be; a recurring knee injury in 2021 kept him off the pitch for both their memorable win over the Vancouver Whitecaps and their CPL Final triumph over Forge FC. However, he tries not to dwell on the negatives from that year, recalling instead how he still did all he could to help, even in smaller ways on the training pitch.

“I think that also was important for the group and important for me, to feel like I was able to give something, even if it was a little bit of one per cent that helped,” he said. “For me, I was happy with that. But what motivates me most is, obviously, football; I’ve been playing professional football for 10 years and what motivates me most is just my drive and passion for the game, and the standard I try to hold myself to. Every day is not going to be sunshine and rainbows, but I’m a big believer that hard work every day eventually pays off.”

After three years on Van Isle, Bustos took the leap abroad to try and follow his dreams in Europe, signing with Värnamo in the Swedish top flight.

Now, Bustos feels he’s coming back even better. He calls himself a more calm person, and explains that he’s hit “a new level” on the pitch as well.

He describes himself as a player who used to prefer leading by example, but he’s looking to take a more active role in fostering a winning atmosphere at Pacific.

“I want to have more of a voice, and I think to be able to do that in the right way is about gaining the respect of your teammates,” he said. “As soon as I come in, that’s my goal for sure, to get to know every single one of my teammates on a personal level is definitely important. We’re all soccer players, but at the end of the day, we’re also human beings.”

In Sweden, the immense pressure of a relegation battle gave Bustos a new perspective on what it takes to succeed in difficult moments.

“On the personal side it’s helped me a lot mentally, moving across the globe to follow my dreams,” he said. It hasn’t been easy, that’s for sure. But when the going gets tough is when you’ve got to stand up, and I think I was able to do that here.”

When Värnamo finished 14th in the 2024 Allsvenskan campaign, they were faced with a two-legged tie against second-division side Landskrona to decide which club would play in the second tier in 2025.

“It was crazy, because you could actually feel the pressure at every training session,” Bustos said. “Then in the games you can feel every pass, every shot, every tackle, everything matters.”

Värnamo went down a man with a red card in the first half of leg one, and before long they were down 2-1, staring relegation in the face. With the match all but finished, though, it was Bustos — a late substitute — who floated a corner kick to his teammate’s head for the equalizer, allowing Värnamo to win the tie in the home leg three days later.

Now leaving Sweden with 43 games under his belt for a top-flight club, Bustos departs with a sense of pride for his contributions. On an individual level, he also returns to Canada with a wealth of new experiences, having seen the high-pressure environments of playing opponents like Malmö and Hammarby, sides that occasionally compete in the UEFA Champions League and play in 30,000-seat venues.

Bustos is back in Canada with unfinished business, though. He has his sights set, not just on bringing more silverware to Vancouver Island, but on reaching such heights as winning the Canadian Championship.

To do so, they’re getting the band back together. The Tridents’ squad still features 2021 title winners Josh Heard and Sean Young, and they’ve now reunited perhaps the most dangerous right-sided duo in CPL history, as full-back Kadin Chung also returns to share a flank with Bustos again.

“When you have a teammate that you just understand, it’s not something — of course you can practice it, practice practice, but sometimes you don’t find that spark, and that happens in every team,” Bustos said of his chemistry with Chung.

“But with me and Kadin, I feel like we know each other really well in our movements, and I think we’re breathing the same type of air in the sense of soccer and the way we like to play the game, and I think that’s an important match to have when you’re on the pitch.”

In hindsight, that 2021 Pacific team might be the most stacked in CPL history. In addition to the four members reuniting in 2025, that squad featured the likes of Manny Aparicio, Alessandro Hojabrpour, Callum Irving and Ollie Bassett, not to mention a striker rotation of Alejandro Díaz and Terran Campbell — now the CPL’s top two all-time goalscorers — and a centre-back pairing of Thomas Meilleur-Giguère and Lukas MacNaughton.

Although most of those players have opted to move on from the Island in search of new opportunities, both in the CPL and elsewhere, the winning mentality built in that group is what Bustos hopes to rekindle this season.

“Right away it’s, how do I instill my mentality into my teammates?” he said. “The most important thing for me, for sure, is to get the team on the right path together, because together wins championships. Doing it alone doesn’t win you anything.”

The sight of the diminutive number 10 cutting in from the right flank at Starlight Stadium will be a familiar, but much-welcomed one for Pacific fans.

If Bustos can help lift his side to the heights it reached before, silverware might soon be back in style on Vancouver Island.