Vancouver FC's best season ended one point short. Here's the year in nine dates.

Twenty-ninth minute, Calgary, Sunday afternoon. Ali Musse taps in a Michael Baldisimo free kick, and four time zones away a 4-3 scoreline in Halifax turns into the one that matters. Vancouver FC lost 1-0 to Cavalry on the last day of the Canadian Premier League season while Supra du Québec beat the Wanderers, and the club that had sat fourth for 14 straight weeks finished fifth, one point out of the playoffs.

That stings. It is also, by a distance, the best year this club has had, and the first one where the question in Langley stopped being “will they ever” and became “how close”.

The season in nine dates

January 14. Martin Nash, the interim coach who picked the team up from last place midway through 2025 and took it to a Canadian Championship final, gets the job for real. Everything below follows from that.

February 4. Cruz Azul at Willoughby. Because of that cup final run, a CPL team that finished bottom of its league in 2025 hosted one of Mexico’s biggest clubs in the Concacaf Champions Cup, on a February night in Langley. The Eagles lost 3-0, then 5-0 in Mexico the following week. Nobody in the stands that night minded very much. It was the club’s first continental match, and there is no guarantee Langley gets another one soon.

April 4. The home opener draws 3,528, the season’s biggest crowd, for a 1-0 loss to Halifax. The team then lost to Forge and Inter Toronto. Three games, zero points. If you stopped paying attention in April, you missed the year.

May 10. The Canadian Championship starts at home against Langley United, the BC Premier League club that shares Willoughby with VFC. A 2-0 win, two goals from Field. A Langley-versus-Langley cup tie is the kind of thing this stadium was built for, and it deserves a bigger crowd next time.

July 4. Inter Toronto come to Willoughby and leave 4-0 down. Mohamed Amissi scores a hat-trick, one of only three in the whole league this year. The club was mid-run: five wins in six league games by late July, including a 5-1 away win at Supra on July 17 that tied for the biggest away win anyone recorded in the CPL this season.

July 24. The night the season turned from good to memorable. Vancouver had played Cavalry 16 times since 2023 without a win. Cavalry defender Eryk Kobza was sent off before half-time, Lys Mousset rolled in the rebound after Damiano Pecile hit the crossbar, and VFC won 1-0 at home. Fourth straight home win, and provisionally third in the table at the halfway point.

August 26. The Whitecaps sign Emrick Fotsing, the 18-year-old midfielder who co-captained Canada’s under-20s, on a contract that runs through the 2029-30 MLS season. He was loaned back to Langley for the rest of the CPL year, so the deal cost the Eagles nothing on the field this season, and it tells you what the club is becoming: a place where a young Canadian can play his way into MLS. The Whitecaps’ release credits him with 25 starts in 39 appearances for VFC since he arrived from the CF Montréal academy in February 2025.

October 16. A must-win Friday at Willoughby against Halifax. Thierno Bah scored first, the Wanderers equalised before the break, and Matteo Campagna headed in Aboubacar Traore’s cross in the 76th minute. Before the game, Nash had already said that whatever happened, this would be the highest finish in the club’s history. He was right.

October 25. Calgary. See above. Marcello Polisi was sent off late for a challenge on Levi Laing, and Supra became the first expansion team in league history to make the playoffs in its first year. Fine margins.

What the numbers say about next year

Thirty-seven points is a seven-point jump on the club’s previous best and a 16-point jump on 2025. Two players, Amissi and Terran Campbell, finished with seven league goals each, which tells you the Eagles spread the scoring around rather than leaning on one striker, and Bah finished among the league’s assist leaders with five. The defence conceded 37, third-fewest in the league behind only the two teams who finished 20-plus points clear of everyone.

Attendance is the other story. An average of 1,950 is still the smallest in the CPL, and the club will want more of Langley in the stands. But a 40% jump in one year is the biggest in the league, and it happened in a season when overall CPL attendance fell by about a tenth. People in Willoughby are starting to show up.

Nash said in October he could see the club fighting for the top two “in a year or two”. The gap this year was 21 points, so that is a stretch. Fourth, though, was a single point away, and the two teams that beat Vancouver to the top four each conceded more goals than they scored.

If you want to be there in 2027

The 2027 schedule is not out yet; the CPL season has run April to October, and the league final is on Saturday, November 21 this year at a venue still to be announced. Season memberships for 2027 are on sale now through the club site, and single-match tickets and packs usually follow in the new year. The stadium sits in Willoughby Community Park beside the Langley Events Centre; our Vancouver FC page has the directions card, and our Langley United page covers the club that shares the pitch. Matches stream on OneSoccer if you can’t get there.

One point. That is the whole off-season, in two words.