You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a pundit for Toronto FC or the Montreal Impact, but on a national level the Whitecaps and their lower-division western rivals go almost entirely neglected. So I take perverse joy in writing the stories nobody else is writing about the teams nobody east of Winnipeg cares about.

Over the coming weeks, that's exactly what I'm going to do. There'll be plenty of Whitecaps content, of course: news, game notes, opinion pieces, the treacly editorial that is the province of the sports blogger. The Canadian national team and their two friendlies at the beginning of September will certainly not go neglected. But you'll also read about FC Edmonton's latest foibles, or maybe big news out of Abbotsford's PDL team. If you want yet another reaction to Chad Barrett's inaccuracy or Stefan Frei's brilliance, you're in the wrong place, but if your idea of a soccer-loving Canada stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic then welcome aboard.