As in previous Cup games here, there will be a Taste of Mexico at Hamilton Stadium for Tuesday night’s first leg of the Concacaf Champions Cup’s opening round between Forge FC and Los Tigres UANL of Monterrey.
A strong contingent of Tigres supporters will make the trip for the game, which will be played in vastly different weather conditions than those they leave behind in Mexico. Tigres’ support will be spread throughout the stadium.
To accommodate and express appreciation for the fans flying in from Mexico, Forge officials are permitting them to enter the stadium half an hour before the gates officially open.
Forge enjoys strong and steadily growing support in this city, but ironically, they are as well-known in Central America and Mexico, particularly the Monterrey area, as they are in parts of Hamilton.
Forge’s sustained international history with top teams from soccer-mad countries has earned them enormous respect throughout Concacaf, and, it says here, despite weather more suited to outdoor hockey, it would be great to see local soccer fans respond to the Hammers’ successes by turning out in numbers to back their underdog club on Tuesday night.
Newest team Canada player returns home as a big piece of Tigres’ offence
Local fans can catch a glimpse of Canada’s Men’s World Cup future in Tuesday’s game. Tigres' 22-year-old forward and attacking midfielder Marcelo Flores has reportedly chosen Canada as his international team rather than Mexico, his father’s home country. Marcelo’s sisters Silvana and Tatania have both played for Mexico’s age-class national teams. Tatiana, who played professionally in Spain, and Silvana, who has been capped by Mexico’s senior team, are both now with Los Tigres in Liga Mx Femenil, the country’s top professional women’s league.
All the Flores children were born in Georgetown, Ontario. Their father played professionally, including for Mexico’s Cruz Azul, before turning to coaching in Canada. He was a regional and provincial head coach with the Ontario Soccer Association—and coached Forge’s director of soccer Jelani Smith—and started his coaching with Burlington 88s, served as assistant coach for the Hamilton Rage of Ontario’s Premier Development League before the club was sold and moved to Kitchener-Waterloo and was also head coach of the Cayman Islands’ women’s national team.
Marcelo Flores is usually brought in to substitute for Angel Correa, but did start the first game of the Monterrey side’s opening game of the Clausura season in January and scored both goals in a 2-1 win over San Luis, Los Tigres’ only win—and only goals—in their first four games of the second-half schedule.
Flores has pace to his game and strong technical ability, and Canada began courting him four years ago. He appeared to have chosen Mexico as his international team, but hasn’t played for the national team in three years.
He played in the Arsenal system in England for three years and spent a year in Spain’s second division before heading in 2023 to Los Tigres UANL, for whom he has nine goals in 57 games, despite essentially playing behind Correa, the Argentine who scored 69 goals for Atlético Madrid in a 12-year stint there before joining Los Tigres six months ago.
Hammers want to interrupt Tigres’ successful Canadian streak
This will be the Tigres’ 10th official game in recent years against a Canadian team, and in the previous nine, they won six times and had three draws: they are 4-2-0 against Vancouver Whitecaps and 2-1-0 against Toronto FC. But in none of their Vancouver games was arctic weather a factor, and the Monterrey side’s two 2018 games in Toronto were played in early March and mid-September, vastly different from the Polar Vortex currently locked over Hamilton.
Having a ball
During Thursday’s indoor practice at Redeemer College, Forge had its first exposure to the new FIFA-designated game ball, which will be used for Champions Cup play. The Molten FSC 5000 Triple C ball has a different sound when struck than the Derbystar ball, which was the CPL’s official ball until this season, when the league switched to the Voit Primera. According to players, the new FIFA ball feels lighter and has a higher bounce than previous game balls. It doesn’t make as thick a sound as many other balls when struck and has a different panelling surface than the more rubbery-feeling Voit ball.
Short Shots: A lot of positives came out of Forge’s training stint in Cancún, and one was the play of striker Brian Wright, who scored against Inter Playa and was a force throughout camp. Wright, the CPL Players' Player of the Year in 2024, played his first game for Forge at this time a year ago, in Champions Cup against CF Monterrey …as is becoming a tradition in Hamilton, players new to the team get their first exposure to Forge fans in a cold-weather February game against a top Mexican side. Among the new ones this year is 19-year-old striker Ismael Oketokoun from Mallorca, Spain who has played in several Spanish programs and also played seven games for Platges de Calviá in Spain’s fourth tier professional league, scoring twice … congrats to forward Marcus Caldeira who signed with Minnesota United of MLS this week after scoring 42 goals over his career at West Virginia University, where his 17 game-winning goals were a program record. Caldeira played with Forge-affiliated Sigma FC Academy and made his debut with Forge on a development contract at age 17. He had four CPL appearances for Forge, recording an assist, and was the League1 Ontario Young Player of the Year in 2023 … The CPL has alertly seized upon mounting World Cup and Champions League (three of the four Canadian teams which qualified are from the CPL) interest with a new brand identity unveiled earlier this week, with a new logo and colours. It reflects the seven-plus years of the CPL’s position at the top of the country’s elite-player pathway. The rebranding runs in parallel with an upgrading of the status of the country’s various League1 pro-am systems, which are now known collectively as Premier Soccer Leagues Canada.
PSLC connects deeply-rooted community clubs from across the country to deeply-rooted community clubs across both the men’s and women’s game.