Jonathan David always had his heart set on playing for Canada
The U.S. "wasn't even on his mind," says former Canada coach
One storyline that’s been well documented leading up to the World Cup is the number of dual nationals on the Canadian men’s national team (something I touched on for Daily Hive today), and how they actually chose to play for Canada.
Crazy, right?
In some cases, those players had some hard decisions to make. Junior Hoilett, for example, pondered the decision for years, before ultimately committing to Canada over Jamaica. But for others, like the dynamic duo of Alphonso Davies and Jonathan David, there was really only one country on their mind.
(It’s Canada, if that wasn’t clear.)
Both Davies and David have been a part of Canada’s youth national team system from a young age, starting with U-15 identification camps coached by Ante Jazic. And perhaps more importantly, they both felt a genuine emotional attachment to Canada above any other country.
For now, let’s focus on David.
Born in Brooklyn, New York to Haitian parents, he moved to Haiti when he was three months old. Then, at the age of six, he and his parents immigrated to Ottawa. That would have made David eligible to represent the U.S., Haiti, or Canada on the international stage.
This is something that came up in my recent conversation with Octavio Zambrano, who was John Herdman’s predecessor as head coach of the Canadian men’s national team. About a month after he was hired, Zambrano said he watched David play with the Canadian U-17 national team at the 2017 Concacaf Men’s U-17 Championship in Panama. He’d already had “many conversations” with then-Canadian U-17 coach Paul Stalteri about David, and was seriously considering calling him up to the senior team for the Gold Cup three months later (coincidentally, the same tournament that Davies announced himself the world).
“We needed to lock him in for Canada,” Zambrano said when we spoke in July 2021.
Although David scored two goals against Suriname in Canada’s final game of the U-17 championship, Zambrano left the tournament feeling he wasn’t quite ready for the senior team.
“So, I was really confronted with the idea of just taking him, not on the base of merit, to the Gold Cup,” he said. “Just so I could put a jersey on him and debut him so he couldn’t play for any other team. We all knew that he had roots also in the United States. And it was a tough decision. But I couldn’t bring myself to take a spot from another player.”
So they left him off the roster. But they felt confident in doing so without worrying about the U.S. or Haiti swooping in, because David had “already committed, much earlier, to play for Canada,” Zambrano said.
“The times that I had a chance to speak to him, it was clear that the idea of playing for the United States wasn’t even on his mind,” he added. “Then, to be perfectly honest, the United States was not pursuing him at all.”
At the time, Tab Ramos was the youth technical director for the U.S. national team program, and Zambrano said they spoke often – Ramos, coincidentally, captained the MetroStars team that Zambrano coached in MLS during the early 2000s.
“He was aware of [David], but there were so many players that, it’s not like he wasn’t a priority, he knew, but what seemed was driving the interest of the American side was Ayo Akinola,” Zambrano said. “He was the one they were thinking about as a great player to bring into the national team. All the buzz was around him. In a way, it worked out well, because the attention was on him and Jonathan was kind of a little bit on the background.”
Ramos would, eventually, invite David to join the U.S. U-20 national team the following year, but David respectfully declined.
His heart was set on Canada.
“The decision wasn’t too hard,” David said earlier this year, as quoted in The Province. “The country welcomed my family and gave us a chance at a better life. It’s kind of my way to give back to the country and to say thank you.”
After getting the call from Herdman, David played his first game for the Canadian men’s national team in September 2018, recording two goals and one assist in an 8-0 win over the U.S. Virgin Islands.
And he never looked back.
Davies has scored at an astonishing rate since debuting with the men’s national team, a total of 22 goals in 35 appearances, and is one of the top marksmen in Ligue 1 – alongside players like Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Neymar.
If you’re making a bet on who’s going to score Canada’s first-ever goal at the men’s World Cup, you probably won’t find a better choice than him.
Farhan Devji is a multiplatform storyteller who’s worked in professional sports for close to a decade and been published in some of Canada’s biggest newspapers. His book, Alphonso Davies: A New Hope, is available for pre-order now and scheduled for release in May 2023.