When Derek Martin walked into a meeting with Canadian Premier League officials in December 2016, no professional outdoor sports team had called Halifax home in a generation. The Atlantic Schooners had failed to launch in the 1980s. Talk of a CFL franchise had come and gone in cycles. Halifax was, by most accounts, the largest North American city without a major outdoor stadium or the professional team to fill one.
Less than three years later, Martin had changed that. HFX Wanderers FC played their first match in May 2019 in front of a sellout crowd at the historic Wanderers Grounds, and Halifax had something it had been told it could not sustain: a professional sports team playing outside, downtown, in front of thousands of fans every other weekend.
Seven seasons in, the team Martin built has become one of the most consistently well-attended clubs in the Canadian Premier League. And Martin, the founder and president of the Wanderers, is now in the middle of a much bigger fight.
From quarterback to club founder
Martin’s path to professional soccer ownership did not start with soccer. A graduate of St. Francis Xavier University with a Bachelor of Science in Human Kinetics, he was a quarterback for the X-Men in the late 1990s. His business career took him through NFL Canada, entertainment company eOne, and Easter Seals Nova Scotia before he founded Sports and Entertainment Atlantic, the corporate vehicle that would eventually own the Wanderers.
His ownership group includes Bob Young, the Hamilton-born software entrepreneur and Lulu founder who has owned the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats since 2003.
Derek Martin, then president of Sports and Entertainment Atlantic, at the FIVB Beach Volleyball Junior World Championships in Halifax in 2011. His company brought the tournament to the Halifax waterfront, transforming the Salter Street parking lot into world-class beach volleyball courts with 2,000 tonnes of trucked-in sand. It marked the first time the championship had been held in North America.
The pitch that became a team
The Canadian Premier League was still being assembled when Martin first met with its founders in late 2016. By March 2017, he was at Halifax City Hall pitching councillors on something the city had never seen: a purpose-built, temporary professional soccer venue on the Wanderers Grounds, the public park that has hosted Halifax athletics since the 1880s.
The plan was approved within months. On May 5, 2018, Halifax was officially accepted as one of the founding clubs of the CPL. Three weeks later, the team was unveiled to the public as HFX Wanderers FC, the third club confirmed for the new league.
When the gates opened for the first home match on May 4, 2019, the venue Martin had built was unlike anything else in Canadian professional sport. It was modular, temporary by design, and assembled from the ground up every season. The place was packed.
A model that worked
Martin’s bet was that downtown Halifax could support a smaller, atmospheric stadium where a larger suburban one had repeatedly failed. The Wanderers averaged better than 6,000 fans per match in their inaugural season and have stayed at or above that mark in nearly every year since, with regular sellouts of around 6,500. The arrival of the Halifax Tides, the Northern Super League women’s team that now shares the venue, has added another fan base and another dozen-plus matchdays a year.
In an interview on the team’s Wanderers Weekly show, Martin put numbers to what the team has meant to the local economy. He compared it to the Scotiabank Centre’s recent economic impact report.
“They last year brought in around 450,000 people to the venue, over 100 events. Between the Wanderers and the Tides, we’re about a third of that,” he told host Dominik Diamond. “Their economic impact was $45 million, so it’s kind of safe to say that we’re a $15 million a year economic impact to the city. And that’s been now going on for the last eight years, right? So when you do the math, there’s $120 million that’s been generated by the Wanderers being here.”
The community side, he said, is harder to quantify but easier to feel.
“You’re at a game and you see 6,500 people having an amazing time and connecting with new friends, old friends, family, all of these different communities that have formed around the Wanderers,” Martin said. “To think that that isn’t appreciated or isn’t valued is really a punch in the gut in terms of how much effort. Not just me, but our entire staff and our fans and our players and everybody puts so much into this that you just want to feel like that’s being respected and valued.”
Frustration nine years in the making
The patience Martin brought to those early years has worn thin. The temporary stadium model was always supposed to be a proof of concept. Nine years after first walking into city hall, he is still operating one.
“There’s been some great signs and it’s important to keep some perspective on things, and just a lot of frustration around working on this stadium solution at the Wanderers Grounds for the last nine years and feeling like we continually run into challenges and roadblocks that don’t seem to be focused on finding solutions. It’s more finding more problems,” Martin told Diamond. “Eventually that is going to have to change.”
The team now pays the highest game-day operating costs in the Canadian Premier League, Martin said, for a facility that still lacks running water and flushable toilets. New ticket and beverage surcharges introduced by the municipality this season have added to the strain.
“It would boggle my mind to think that they would allow a situation like we have at the Wanderers Grounds at the Scotiabank Centre for the fans of the Mooseheads, or the fans of the Thunderbirds,” Martin said. “It’s quite something that this has been allowed to continue.”
He acknowledged that the city is dealing with competing pressures, from the aging Halifax Forum to the Scotiabank Centre, which he said is approaching the end of its useful life and will eventually require a multi-hundred-million-dollar decision of its own.
“It’s an interesting, difficult time,” he said. “The great thing about the city growing is that we have opportunities for more fans to come to sporting events. But there’s also this huge now need and draw on services. And if you don’t increase taxes, which a lot of politicians don’t want to do because increasing taxes doesn’t usually get you reelected, you get into a financial crunch.”
Martin also accepted some responsibility for letting the situation drift.
“If I have one great regret, I think it’s that I made it too easy for the city for the first seven years to just say, oh, they’re good over there. They’re doing their own thing and they’re generating economic impact and bringing people downtown and we don’t have to worry about it,” he said. “And we’re past that point now.”
A last-ditch proposal
In 2023, Martin’s group brought the city a proposal for a permanent modular stadium at the Wanderers Grounds. Three years later, he is still waiting for a decision. He told the show another proposal will be made public in the next month or two.
“We’re working on some concepts now that we’ll bring out publicly in the next month or two that will be our last-ditch effort here at trying to make this work,” Martin said. “A solution that could work for us, that could work for the Tides, could work for anyone else that wanted to use this venue as a downtown outdoor sports and entertainment venue. But we’re at a critical point.”
He said the alternative is not viable.
“To just continue on in a temporary venue with portable toilets for the next 5 to 10 years, I just don’t think is acceptable.”
When asked whether the team would consider moving outside downtown if the Wanderers Grounds project fails, Martin was reluctant.
“The Wanderers Grounds is where we should be. Full stop. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it being the right location,” he said. “But eventually, if there’s an inability to move on any kind of permanent solution at that location, then we need to look at other locations. We’d obviously rather stay downtown. There’s a few other sites downtown that we’ve contemplated and that we’ve taken a look at. Very hopeful we don’t get there.”
On the CPL and the road ahead for Canadian soccer
The frustrations of running a temporary stadium have not dulled Martin’s optimism about the league he helped build. He told Diamond he is genuinely pleased with where the Canadian Premier League is now, even if the pace has been slower than he once hoped.
“Nine years ago, I would have thought we’d be further along,” he said.
He pointed to a recent CRTC decision that will bring OneSoccer, the CPL’s streaming partner, onto Rogers cable as a significant breakthrough. The league had deliberately avoided signing with TSN or Sportsnet at launch, Martin explained, to avoid being locked into the terms of Canada’s broadcast duopoly.
“We took a big risk at a great cost and probably a great delay in terms of our exposure by choosing to start an OTT network in OneSoccer,” he said. “Now that we’ve received the ruling from CRTC, by hopefully the end of this summer or the fall, every home that has cable in the country will be able to click through the channels and see OneSoccer as one of their options. That will be a significant step forward in terms of making us much more relevant across the country.”
He said expansion into Quebec has gone well and that more cities are in the pipeline.
“That growth over the next three to six years will be really important to go from eight teams to 12 teams to 14 teams to 16 teams,” Martin said.
On the airport stadium proposal
Days after Martin’s interview aired, a Delaware-based firm announced a $1.5-billion stadium concept near Halifax Stanfield International Airport, with a possible CFL franchise as the anchor tenant. Martin, the former university quarterback who built a soccer club from scratch in downtown Halifax, has been publicly skeptical of the suburban proposal. He has continued to make the case that the city still needs a smaller, downtown venue, regardless of what may eventually rise off Highway 102.
His position on suburban stadiums was already clear from his appearance on Wanderers Weekly, where he described his time visiting Calgary’s Cavalry FC.
“It was a great atmosphere, but that trek out of town down to Spruce Meadows was such a pain,” he said.
Why he keeps going
On the show, Martin reflected on what makes the job both rewarding and difficult. He has fired two head coaches in seven seasons, both conversations he said he hoped never to repeat. He arrives at the Wanderers Grounds 90 minutes before kickoff, walks the field, greets the coaches and players, and then disappears into his seat above the midfield line, where his staff and family know not to bother him once play begins.
“I usually just stay away from people,” he said. “Luckily I’ve got a great team. I try not to get in their way on game day more than anything. Everybody has their jobs and everybody is very competent in what they do.”
Diamond suggested that owning a professional sports team is like spending a fortune on a set of golf clubs and then letting someone else play with them. Martin laughed.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. It is the most frustrating part of it, by far,” he said. “In a former life, I was an athlete myself, and at least you could control how you performed. And if you screwed up, at least you knew you screwed up, and you knew what you had to do to try to fix it.”
He has hired three head coaches in seven seasons. He has said he does not interfere with tactics or selection.
“I don’t know enough to do that, and what would be the point of hiring someone to do that job if I could do it myself,” he said. “I would just save the money and do it myself.”
And then, more seriously, he returned to the trait he says any entrepreneur needs.
“As an entrepreneur, you have to be an optimist or else it’s way too — you get punched in the face way too often to be a pessimist in this business.”
He is still, by his own description, an optimist.
The full Derek Martin interview is available on Wanderers Weekly via the HFX Wanderers FC YouTube channel.
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