Promotion the prize for FC London

After two forgettable seasons, FC London has bounced back — in a big way — this summer, and the men are on the precipice of earning a spot back in League1 Ontario’s Premier Division.

(Photo: Barry Field Photography).

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Well, that didn’t take long.

Relegated to the Tier 2 Championship Division – the result of two straight losing seasons – FC London’s men’s team has quickly turned their fortunes around with a dominant season this summer, now seemingly all but assured promotion to the Premier Division for 2025.

They’re 11-3-2 through 16 matches, good for second place in League1 Ontario’s Championship Division (behind TFC Academy) and fresh off a 3-3 draw against third-place Unionville Milliken SC last weekend at home, which brought them closer to clinching promotion.

With two matches remaining, FC London needs just one point to punch their ticket to the Premier Division next year. (A loss by Unionville Milliken in either of their own two remaining contests will also send FC London to the league’s best division).

It’s been a refreshing season for the squad after two forgettable ones that relegated them to Tier 2 status. The club finished in last place two years ago, which all but guaranteed their relegation, and they were 13th out of 21 clubs last year. But this team is different.

“The team culture, the way we’re building our environment, I feel like it’s a brotherhood,” said Ryan Baker, the team’s captain. “We’re working together. Everyone’s chatting in the locker room, there are no cliques … it’s not that there was hostility in years passed, but the team wasn’t as close as it should have been, or it could have been.”

That’s not the case this year, and it’s led to some great success on the pitch.

The FC London men jumped out of the gate with a 2-1 regular season win over Windsor FC, and they haven’t looked back. After a 3-0 loss to Unionville Milliken back on May 12, the squad went unbeaten in seven straight regular season matches – a nearly two-month stretch.

Baker believes FC London has one of the deepest teams in the league. Their starting 11 changes routinely, and the captain believes they’ve got some 26 players who could play for any team in the league.

(Photo: Barry Field Photography).

“I feel like the depth of our team and the depth of our training environment has paid dividends to the results we’ve gotten,” Baker said. “Every single person is working towards achieving the same goal.”

And they’re working hard – week in and week out. That’s thanks to the team’s second-year head coach, Yiannis Tsalatsidis.

“The way Yiannis has us training is so intense – sometimes, more intense than the actual matches,” said Baker. “Training is where we make a lot of our mistakes, so that when we actually play in the games, we’re able to bring our ideas to life in a bigger space.”

Though they beat TFC Academy, 1-0, in their first meeting, with Bai Essa Coker scoring the game’s only goal, FC London spent most of the season on the heels of the Toronto-based club, who has clinched first place (they’re 13-1-2 and hold the tiebreaker against London thanks to a 2-0 win in early August).

But now the twist. On Aug. 1, it was announced that TFC Academy won’t be returning to compete in League1 Ontario next season – due to a restructuring of the MLS NEXT age group levels. So, the automatic promotion to the Premier Division shifted from the first-place squad to the second-place team. That’s FC London. And, barring disaster, they’ll hold onto that spot and earn promotion.

(Otherwise, if they’d finished third, they’d have had to play the second-to-last place team in the Premier Division in a one-game playoff to decide who earned a Premier spot next year).

“This is the first year there’s been a promotion-relegation in this country, and we want to be that first team in Canada getting promoted back to the Premier Division,” said Baker.

They’ve been battling to keep up with TFC Academy all year, and that hard work has certainly paid off. What will they need to finish the job and qualify for the league’s top tier?

“We just need to be able to trust each other. We know that we have the quality, because we’ve proven we can beat every team in the league,” said Baker. “I think it’ll take unity, commitment, trust and everything that we’ve been doing all year.”

A veteran of the squad, Baker has a leadership past, captaining both FC London’s U21 team and the Fanshawe Falcons men’s squad during his collegiate years. He’s embraced the role of captain, although he says it extends far beyond him.

“We have a group of five or six of us that are really captains of the team,” the left-footed fullback said. “Yes, I’m the captain, but I feel like we have a team full of leaders, and that’s what has brought us so much success this season.”

(Photo: Barry Field Photography).

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The men have taken a huge step forward this season. Relegated to the second tier of League1 soccer, as a result of two poor seasons, they’ve fought their way back – and in short order. They’ve lost just three times during the regular season heading into the final two weeks of action.

Offensively, they’ve had a well-balanced attack. Coker leads the way with seven goals on the season, while Baker and Efosa Emovon have scored five times each. Dante D’Oria and Santiago Fonseca have four goals to their name, while Daniel Oshana and Ibrahem Saadi have notched two scores apiece.

Defensively, FC London has allowed just 21 goals in 16 matches, the second fewest in the league, behind first-place TFC Academy. Their plus-10 goal differential is also second best.

It’s a strikingly different result than the squad’s recent history, and the club is thrilled to get back to the winning ways of the past, where they were contenders among the league’s top teams. It’s a welcome change.

“We’ve brought success back to the club,” Baker said. “It’s been a few years since we’ve had that, so it’s been awesome to be at the forefront of that.”