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He is the highest-paid and most important player in the MLS era for the Vancouver Whitecaps. But Ryan Gauld’s feet only leave the ground when he’s scoring.
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Published Mar 28, 2024 • Last updated Apr 02, 2024 • 11 minute read
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Whitecaps’ Ryan Gauld fights for the ball with Tigres’ Fernando Gorriaran during the CONCACAF Champions League match between Mexico’s Tigres and Canada’s Caps at the Universitario stadium in Monterrey, Mexico. Photo by Julio Cesar/AFP/Getty /PNG
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There are times when the “laces and faces” — the digital broadcast incursions into locker-rooms before games — are taken as sales opportunities to sell one’s brand or wares.
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Some conspicuously place energy drink bottles or their own clothing brand in their lockers. Others affect the ideal of intellectualism as they appear to intensely focus on some dense tome of Nietzsche-esque philosophy or James Baldwin cultural import — only to have that image blown up when you see them reading the exact same book, on the exact same page, two weeks later.
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Their brand is paramount, and getting those free opportunities to reinforce their carefully crafted caricature of success are rarely passed up.
But when the Apple TV cameras encroached into the Vancouver Whitecaps’ locker-room before their game against San Jose earlier this month, there was no self-promotion or entrepreneurial spirit. Ryan Gauld didn’t toss back an Irn Bru. Fafa Picault wasn’t wearing his Apple Vision Pro goggles.
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While a comically small camera on a stick was stuck in their faces, Brian White affected a lopsided grin while wearing Picault’s oversized sunglasses, looking as natural as a bare-chested, iced out, chain wearing Kirk Cousins. Beside him, Gauld squirmed self-consciously, trying — and failing — to find somewhere natural to look.
“We were planning on just sitting there straight-faced,” said Gauld, “and I don’t know why I was expecting a guy to come in with a big TV camera, but the guy came in with this little tiny thing, just pointing it in our face. Everyone’s looking at us laughing … it was just an awkward 20 seconds. It felt terrible.”
Ryan Gauld has found a home with the Vancouver Whitecaps. He’s a star who can sparkle on the pitch while being anonymous off of the field. Photo by Anthony Redpath/Whitecaps FC /prv
“I just put them on to try to make it a little less awkward, but I think we made it worse,” added White.
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It was a brief but endearing and unintentionally comedic moment from two stars of the MLS team. And it was honest. No pretence nor ostentation nor overt commercial endorsements.
With them, it’s “wizzywig” (what you see is what you get), and it has been from the start.
When Gauld first joined the team in 2021, the Caps were in COVID-19 exile in Salt Lake. Sitting down at the dinner table with White and Jake Nerwinski — the former Jersey Boys duo — the newcomer listened to the pair crack each other up.
“All I remember is me and Jake were making a lot of jokes,” said White. “I don’t know if (Gauld) was laughing, but we were having a good time.”
“I remember sitting at that table and I was just thinking, ‘These guys are weird,’” the Scot joked. “But seriously, it was an easy group to join into.”
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Newly signed Designated Player Ryan Gauld is introduced to the media with sporting director and chief executive officer Axel Schuster and then-head coach Marc Dos Santos in 2021. Photo by Nick Procaylo /PNG
Gauld came with huge external expectations, and a price tag to match. Though he only cost the club around US$417,000 to acquire him — a go-away payment to Farnese, not a transfer fee — his annual salary was over US$2 million, the highest in team history. The extension he signed in January will pay him closer to US3 million per.
The Caps were desperate to get him, seeing him as the missing link. The media did, too, anointing him the team’s saviour before he even kicked a ball. And his status as a high-priced Designated Player meant it wouldn’t have been surprising if he threw his wallet weight around in the locker-room.
But canvass his teammates, and they all use the same word to describe him.
“He’s just so humble,” said midfielder Seb Berhalter. “The way he gets along with every single person on the team. He’s our best player, you couldn’t even tell; even just the clothes he wears, you feel like he’s part of the group.
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“I’ve been in a couple of teams now, and usually those guys drive the nicest cars, they do all this (status stuff). It’s like they want to separate themselves from the group. But he’s just one of the most down-to-earth guys I’ve ever met.”
“You can see that he’s a humble guy,” added wingback Luis Martins. “If you look at him, it doesn’t seem that he has the qualities that he actually has. He looks so normal.
“And when you get time working with him, you can easily understand everything he does. Actually everything he touches turns into gold. He’s a very humble guy, but he works a lot. He’s actually a diamond, maybe.”
Gauld, 28, has two dogs and a fiancée, Kat. His favourite movies are Reservoir Dogs and Taxi Driver. He also loves Harry Potter, Friends, golf and hot chocolate, not necessarily in that order. His father worked for BT Scotland, and was later a firefighter. His mom was a hairdresser — “I didn’t have to pay for a haircut until I came to Vancouver. That’s been the toughest thing to get used to,” he cracked.
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And the next time you’re waiting for the No. 2 Macdonald bus or 99 B-Line, and it pulls up festooned in Whitecaps advertising and Gauld’s face splashed across the side, there’s a chance you might also see his real face in the window above.
“I like to take the bus. It’s cheaper than a parking spot in downtown,” said Gauld.
“He’s a man of the people,” quipped White.
If he was anymore of a regular, everyday normal guy, he’d be in a Jon Lajoie song. A joke about his hometown of Laurencekirk, Scotland, (pop: 3,100), putting a plaque in the village square in recognition of him brought a grimace instead of a grin.
“I’d be embarrassed,” he demurred.
Lournie, as his childhood home is known locally, has only produced one pro soccer player: Gauld. His childhood friends, John and Harry Souttar — who now play for Scottish Premiership club Rangers and English Championship Leicester City, respectively — hailed from Luthermuir, five miles down the A90.
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And to understand Gauld, one must understand where he’s from, and where he’s been.
When he was 10, he was scouted by Dundee United — don’t mistake it for Dundee FC, or your intestines will be used for haggis — and his four-day week of football became seven. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he played with United. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he honed his skills with Ian Cathro, who was United’s academy coach, but had his own separate clinics. Games with Dundee on Saturday, Sundays with Brechin City.
It wasn’t long before his talent began to shine, his star ascendant. The entire country was energized by a rosy-cheeked 17-year-old playing in Scotland’s top division, his name was connected with massive clubs to the south and across the channel to the east. With the energy came the hype, the expectations and the Mini-Messi label. Gauld talks easily about the comparisons with the soccer legend now, but in the past, it was a millstone, a constant weight around his neck.
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A youthful Ryan Gauld of Dundee United is carried from the pitch as the Dundee United players celebrate during the William Hill Scottish Cup semi-final between Rangers and Dundee United at Ibrox Stadium on April 12, 2014, in Glasgow. Photo by Mark Runnacles/Getty Images /PNG
As much to escape the attention as to develop in a club that had sired Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Figo and Nani, Gauld took his talents to Sporting CP in Portugal. He flew to Portugal to sign a six-year contract and complete a US$4 million transfer, dazzled by the sun, the warmth, and the skill. But he was still just a teenager, alone and in a foreign country.
And he couldn’t completely escape the McMessi talk, frequently sharing his distaste that he would get waylaid by fans using the undesired moniker instead of his name, but he also found a far warmer reception from others — even from fans of rivals Benfica.
“I think it was worse in Scotland than Portugal,” he said. “You could hear it now again in Portugal, but me not at the time being able to speak, understand or read Portuguese, it didn’t really affect me as much. But, yeah, there was that added extra pressure I could have done without.
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“It’s different because when I was 18, when they were saying that, adding the extra pressure, expecting you to become the next big thing. Now it’s more funny to look back on, because when you think of how many people have been labelled the new whatever, whoever … you could look at probably 15 different European countries who’ve got Mini-Messi somewhere.”
The hype didn’t help him to break into the first team at Sporting, where he was up against the likes of Adrien Silva, William Carvalho and João Mário. His only first-team appearances were in Cup competition, and he spent the entire year with the B team, playing out of position as a No. 8.
And neither luck nor politics were on his side.
Manager Marco Silva, hired just months before Gauld landed in Lisbon, led the Portuguese’ giants to their first trophy in seven years — the Taça de Portugal — and into the qualifying rounds of the Champions League. Four days after his Taça (Cup) triumph, and with three years left on his contract, the Leões sacked him — saying he had missed an official meeting and failed to wear an official Sporting suit for a league game earlier in that year.
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Silva’s replacement, Jorge Jesus, didn’t take a fancy to the diminutive Scot, and Gauld soon found himself on loan at Vitória de Setúbal. He felt he was fitting in well, but his loan was infamously cut short after his team knocked Sporting out of the League Cup in the quarterfinals on a controversial 93rd-minute penalty.
“That still baffles me,” he said this week.
Gauld went out on loans to Aves and Farense, before Jesus’s tenure ended in dramatic fashion. After the team failed to qualify for the Champions League, a group of around 50 fans or “ultras” broke into the team facility, using clubs, fists and belts to attack the players and staff — which also included former Whitecaps striker Fredy Montero at the time.
Five days later, Sporting lost the League Cup final and Jesus was axed. Neither of his ensuing replacements, José Peseiro and then Tiago Fernandes, liked Gauld either, and he was once again relegated to a loan.
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He was shipped off to second-division Farense, and after a brief flirtation with Scottish football on another loan at Hibernian, returned to Farense once his contract with Sporting had expired.
“I think there was like a few … you could say different chapters on my time at Sporting,” he said. “Every year I was kind of looking at it more like I need to get out and prove what I can do, and that I wasn’t going to really improve until I went somewhere and played a full flow of games.
“It wasn’t until I actually went to Farense that I got a full run of games and started kind of believing in myself again.”
Gauld was the engine that drove the Lions of Faro back to the top flight of Portuguese football for the first time in 18 years. He was top 10 in both goals and assists — one of just three players to accomplish that. He was voted LigaPro’s player of the year by opposing team captains and coaches.
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Ryan Gauld was one of the best players at his position in Portgual’s Primeira Liga for Farense in 2020. Photo by Getty Images /PNG
COVID scuttled most of the 2020 season in Portugal, and the momentum Farense had built dissipated. They were relegated back to the second division. And while Gauld had a release clause in his contract allowing him to look elsewhere should Faro drop back down, the Portuguese team pushed the Caps to pay them something — it wound up being US$400,000 — to sign him.
The lad from Lournie again had suitors lined up for his services, but the same desire for adventure that landed him in Portugal pushed him to try something new: MLS. And a return home wasn’t appealing, as his brief, injury-plagued time with Hibernian left him feeling out of phase with Scottish football.
“The perception of (MLS) in a lot of the U.K. and Europe is it’s kind of not a finished league … and that it wasn’t the wisest career move,” he said. “ I still remember in Faro, quite a few people coming up to me and saying, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go to MLS, don’t go to Saudi. Go and play in a good league.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Like MLS is a good league.’ I had seen a couple of people over here like Johnny (Russell) was doing really well and he was loving it.
“The way I like to play football, when I was at Hibs … it wasn’t a good fit. It’s hard to, like, put my finger on the reason it didn’t work out, but I just didn’t feel comfortable … And at the same time, I didn’t want to be in a situation where I’m comfortable, and all my friends and family are like dead close and I could fall into going out all the time. I don’t want to feel comfortable. I wanted to test myself. Football’s a short career and there’s so much to try and test myself out.”
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And he’s doing it alongside Kat Hutchinson, the girl he sat beside in high school but was too shy to speak to. He proposed to her as a summer sunset danced over the waves on a Tofino beach last year, one of the numerous travel adventures they have taken. His best man will be Euan Spark, one of his teammates from Brechin City.
Gauld has now played more games for Vancouver than for any other club in his career. He’s won two Canadian Championships. He’s played on an MVP level, and been anointed the Working Class DP. He has more assists and goal contributions (26 goals, 34 assists) than any Whitecap in MLS history.
There are four years left on his deal, and he has high hopes for the rest of them.
“We’ve not had the league success I would have hoped but we’ve got four years to turn that around,” he said. “I think it’s a good time to be a part of the club. There’s definitely been growth in the last almost three years I’ve been here, so we’re definitely going in the right direction. We need some league success now. That’s what we’re here for — to win.”
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jadams@postmedia.com
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