The B.C. Lions still don’t have any answers for how they’re going to schedule their 2026 home games, being displaced by the World Cup. And they’re not alone.
When the B.C. Lions announced Thursday that they would be heading across the Strait of Georgia for a pre-season game against the Calgary Stampeders, it was easy to draw a straight line looking ahead to 2026.
If Starlight Field could host them for the May 19 game with the Stamps, could it be their temporary home next season when the World Cup displaces them from B.C. Place for six weeks?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
“There’s not many options, but there are some options. Here’s what I know for sure: we can’t go on the road for six games. We just can’t do that,” said Lions president Duane Vienneau.
The road to the World Cup 2026 just marked T-minus 500 days last month, when B.C. Place will host seven FIFA games — including two knockout-round matches — between June 18 and July 7.
The logistics include a resurfacing of the playing field, as the current pitch is neither safe nor esthetically pleasing enough by FIFA standards.
PavCo (the B.C. Pavilion Corp.), the Crown entity that operates the stadium, just opened bids for the installation of the playing surface for the Cup, on Feb. 3, with a closing date of March 3. Shortlisted respondents will be notified by March 18.
The winning bid will be responsible for supplying and installing field protection panels over the existing synthetic turf; supplying and installing modular panels such as Permavoid, any sand and root zone materials, irrigation pumps, vacuum and a ventilation system; a FIFA Quality Pro synthetic turf around the field of play; FIFA approved goals including foundations, as well as the deconstruction and off-site removal of all materials at the end of the Cup — or when instructed by PavCo.
The Lions’ season usually starts during the first week of June, meaning they would miss around six game weeks. When the Women’s World Cup came to Vancouver in 2015, the Leos were out of the Dome for their season-opener in Ottawa, then returned to B.C. Place the next week to face Saskatchewan in their home-opener.
The absence in 2026 from B.C. Place will be much longer. With their season kicking off around the same time as the men’s Cup, Vienneau estimates it will be at least six weeks that they need to account for.
“Is there a bye? Is there an extra road game, and is there potentially an off-site game somewhere?” he pondered. “But right now, really, there’s no commitments to going to Langford or Victoria or to anywhere, if that’s even a possibility at this point.
“We are hammering on it, though, because we’re not far away from the next schedule. Once one’s released, the next one’s up … We need to make sure that we have our plan put to bed and ready to go.
“If I don’t have a plan by Sept. 1 on how we’re going to manage this, then we don’t have a schedule next year. Simple as that.”
The issue isn’t just a team problem. The Toronto Argonauts will also be bounced from BMO Field for the Cup. Even though there are five games slated for their stadium, there’s the possibility that they might be out longer from their stadium than B.C.
“Our job to the league is tell them where are we going to play our nine games. We come up with this plan, but ultimately they have to approve our plan,” Vienneau added. “We’re all going to be working together to figure out this. Toronto’s in the same boat. They put the pressure on the remaining East teams, and we put the pressure on the West teams. So the whole league has pressure. Everybody, all nine teams in the league are saying, ‘OK, what is the best solution for this?’ Because they don’t want to have all these home games early either. So it’s something that we’re all talking about, all working on, we just don’t have the answers yet.”
Returning to Royal Athletic Park (RAP) in Victoria, where they had the wildly successful Touchdown Pacific game last August, is a possibility, even if they only broke even financially on the game. Starlight is another, if additional seating and facilities can be erected for the required 15,000-plus seats.
Other possibilities, which would also need massive expansion: Kamloops’ Hillside Stadium, home of their annual training camp; Kelowna’s Apple Bowl; Thunderbird Stadium or even Simon Fraser University’s new (and unused) Terry Fox Field. Facility-wise, all would need big temporary additions. But philosophy-wise, it would make sense for the team that prides itself on being a provincewide club.
“Anything’s a possibility. We haven’t been to Kelowna, because there’s not really a stadium there, but there wasn’t really a stadium at RAP either,” Vienneau said of potential neutral-game sites. “It’s not the same as being at home from the economics perspective, but it does fit our mandate of being the B.C. Lions team, being B.C.’s team.”
The other tenants of B.C. Place, the Vancouver Whitecaps, will also be homeless leading up to the Cup. MLS will pause all games during the month-long tournament, but the Caps are hit with the double-whammy of being a host city team, and they’ll have to vacate the facility far in advance.
The installation of the field and stadium prep means their home field could be unavailable as early as the beginning of April. Annual PavCo customers like The Vancouver Sun Run, which is held in April, have been told to make alternative plans.
The Caps’ regular season usually starts in March, meaning they could be forced to find an alternative for up to eight home dates if they can’t access the stadium after the month’s end. Caps president Axel Schuster was unavailable for comment by press deadline.