Ali Ahmed has only been in England a few months, but he can’t wait to go home. You get the impression the Canadian international would walk and swim every one of the 5,000-odd kilometres between Norwich and Toronto, if that’s what it required for him to play in his country’s first match of the 2026 World Cup in June. Ahmed, currently at Norwich City, was born in Toronto and played for Vancouver Whitecaps, and while the World Cup will be a homecoming for many Canadian footballers—including captain Alphonso Davies in Munich and Juventus’s Jonathan David—Ahmed is particularly looking forward to playing in both his home and adopted cities on football’s biggest stage.
“Even the idea of playing in a World Cup is kind of crazy,” Ahmed says, shaking his head. “I grew up watching France, Brazil, Spain, and now I know that I will be there among them representing my country in my country. I am speechless. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like, but I know I will get a little emotional coming out in my home cities. I grew up as a fan watching Toronto, and obviously I spent the last few years playing in Vancouver. It’s going to be special to be back there, man.”
We meet at Norwich’s training ground, a tidy collection of one-storey buildings in the countryside outside the city centre. Norwich is a small city that is less than two hours from London by train but feels as if it’s from another era. It’s pretty and quiet, with an excellent castle, a historic cathedral, and a series of winding, overlapping alleys that follow a medieval street plan. On the way into the station, the train passes Carrow Road, the tight, traditional-looking stadium of 27,000 where Championship side Norwich play their fixtures. The city has its share of spires and apartment blocks, but the surrounding countryside is famously flat and featureless—no wonder Ahmed talks wistfully of Vancouver’s mountains, the things he misses most from home, along with his family, driving on the right, and hanging out at Cactus Club.
The gentle pace of Norwich offers a refuge between the hurly-burly of twice-weekly matches in the hard-fought English second tier. It seems to suit Ahmed, who is polite and eager to engage but, like most footballers, would rather be kicking a ball around than talking to a journalist. In Ahmed’s case, that’s understandable as it’s taken a lot to reach this point in his career. A slight, technical left winger, he wanted to play in Europe since he was a teenager, having grown up watching the English Premier League as well as Italian Serie A with his Lazio-supporting mother. His parents were originally from Ethiopia but lived in Italy before moving to Canada, where Ahmed was born in 2000.
“Even the idea of playing in a World Cup is kind of crazy. I grew up watching France, Brazil, Spain, and now I know that I will be there among them representing my country in my country.
He is now arguably the highest-profile Canadian international in England. He joined Norwich in January on the back of a successful season for the Whitecaps, having reached the MLS final against Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami—Ahmed scored Vancouver’s goal in a 3-1 defeat. This was the third time Ahmed faced the legend. “I played against Messi the first time in the Copa América for Canada against Argentina,” he says. “I asked for his shirt, but he said a teammate had already asked for it. Then I played against him in the MLS, and I was too embarrassed to ask again. Sharing a field with a player like that—one of the greatest to play, right?—it’s probably one of my biggest achievements. I grew up watching guys like that—it’s an honour to compete against them.”
New signings usually take a while to adapt to a new league in a new country, but Ahmed arrived in Norwich with a bang, scoring two goals in his first three games, celebrating with a knee slide. He is only 25, but this was his third attempt to make it in Europe, and his story is one of the more unusual in professional football, demonstrating impressive perseverance and considerable courage. At 17, offered a contract with Toronto FC, he turned it down, wanting to try for Europe. He’d been scouted when his club side toured Portugal, so he returned alone for trials in Portugal and Spain. Unsuccessful, he went back to Canada, where he was turned down by the Whitecaps. Undaunted, he returned to Europe, this time for trials in England, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Even coaches at English amateur clubs such as Tooting & Mitcham, in the ninth tier of English football with attendances of around 300, weren’t impressed, feeling his slender frame couldn’t stand up to the physicality of matches at this level.
Ahmed demonstrates his moves during a photo shoot at the Norwich City training base in the spring.
Many would have given up at this point, but Ahmed was determined—plus, he admits, he hadn’t got a Plan B. Back he went to Vancouver and, in 2020, secured a contract with the Whitecaps Academy. Even that was no guarantee of success, as nobody had yet transitioned from there into the first team. But Ahmed stuck at it, making his first-team debut in April 2022.
“I made my debut in a game where we were getting killed, and it was hot. We were losing 3-0 in Austin, and I was blowing at the end. I thought it was a different level, I was getting a bit scared, but then I did a lot more training with the team and began to feel I wasn’t out of place. When I went into my first full season, I was confident.”
Ahmed’s success was a breakthrough for himself and for Canadian football. The first player to be promoted from Whitecaps FC 2 and sign a first-team contract, he showed there was a pathway from the academy to the reserves and then into the first team. This fear of progression was one of the reasons he’d turned down Toronto at 17. “Every kid’s dream in Toronto is to play for Toronto FC, but there was a bit of a stigma around the academy,” he says. “It had a reputation for players getting stuck. They go there and don’t make it to the first team, and their career is finished. Even at Vancouver, it wasn’t easy to transition from the academy. There are so many talented players from Toronto, but they have to go elsewhere for opportunities. A lot of us went elsewhere—to Vancouver and over the border.”
After his delayed start, Ahmed hit the ground running. In June 2023, little more than a year after his first match for the Whitecaps, he made his international debut for Canada against Guadeloupe. The following couple of seasons saw him develop into a regular for the national and the MLS teams. It helped that he felt at home in Vancouver, enjoying the change in mood after the bustle of Toronto. “It’s very beautiful,” he says. “With the mountains, the beaches, the nature. It has everything, including much better weather than Toronto.”
A professional boost came in August 2025 when the Whitecaps signed German legend Thomas Müller, one of football’s most decorated players whose multiple successes for Bayern Munich and Germany include lifting the 2014 World Cup and the Champions League in 2013 and 2020. Ahmed had already faced MLS big guns, including Messi and Luis Suárez at Inter Miami, Sergio Ramos at Monterrey, and Olivier Giroud at Los Angeles. Now he was able to share a dressing room with one of the most successful players of all time.
“When Thomas Müller signed, we could reap all his experience,” Ahmed says. “He has won everything at the highest level. To be around a guy with those achievements, you see how they act in training, in camps, in games, and try to pick up what you can. He was a great guy and a great teammate. Off the pitch he might joke around, but as soon as those boots are on, he’s 100 per cent focused. He’s a perfectionist. He sets a very high standard and very high expectations. You have to raise your game to reach that standard and then take that into the games so you are doing it with your eyes closed.”
Ahmed’s first World Cup memory was from the 2010 tournament in South Africa, when Germany finished third. Müller won the Golden Boot for scoring most goals and was named best young player of the tournament. Ahmed watched wide-eyed as Müller scored the opening goal in Germany’s remarkable 7-1 thrashing of Brazil in the 2014 semifinal, and again in 2018 and 2022 when Germany was eliminated in the first round. Müller has played 19 World Cup matches across four tournaments and at Vancouver, Ahmed was able to talk to his older teammate about those memories ahead of Canada’s own World Cup.
“I asked him about the World Cup one time when I was driving him to the airport,” he says. “He told me the year that Germany won, everybody believed. They had the focus and the belief—they knew they were at their best and could be part of this story where they won. But the following tournaments, there was too much going on off the pitch, a few little problems that took away the focus.”
One reason Ahmed was eager to move to England was for the opportunity to play in a country where football is unquestionably the number one sport, with a popularity that overwhelms all other contenders. That clearly isn’t the case in Canada, but Ahmed believes things are changing and the World Cup will provide a monumental boost for the game, particularly when people back home in Vancouver see the carnival atmosphere caused by thousands of fans from all over the world descending on the city this summer.
“[Müller] told me the year that Germany won, everybody believed. They had the focus and the belief—they knew they were at their best.”
“Soccer is the fourth or fifth sport, but it’s growing so fast I feel it’s heading into the top three,” he says. “Especially with the World Cup, which will excite and unite the country and bring a lot more exposure to the game and help grow it in Canada. I would love to see that. If we do well as a team, we can really help things go to another level. When I think where the game was even five years ago, it’s night and day.”
This is Canada’s second successive World Cup following the 2022 tournament. Their three group games all take place in Canada—one in Toronto and two in Vancouver—with the possibility of staying in Vancouver for two further games if they finish on top of their group. That’s an unprecedented opportunity, and Ahmed is ready to embrace the challenge. “We expect to get out of our group, not just participate, and then take it game by game,” he says. “I’d like to play the U.S. I haven’t thought about who we might play after the group stage, but every time we play the U.S., it’s a little extra. There are no friendlies against the U.S.” Especially not now? “Especially not now.”
Is Vancouver ready? Ahmed grins. “I’m not sure they have any idea what the World Cup involves, but this is the perfect chance for them to see what it means to other nations,” Ahmed says. “They will see first-hand how much it brings to a country. It brings people together. This is happening in our home, and I am so excited.”
Read more from our summer 2026 issue.
