The latest Canadian-born player to make a name for himself in Europe is Luka Kulenovic, but the 25-yeard-old will not be representing the country of his birth in the upcoming international break after accepting a call-up from Bosnia & Herzegovina.
The 25-year-old forward, who has four goals in seven Eredivisie appearances for Dutch club Heracles Almelo, was born in Toronto but his parents were born in Bosnia. His decision on Tuesday to choose the Balkan nation showcases the task Canada men’s national team head coach Jesse Marsch has to identify and recruit players to build out his squad ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
With Canada scoring just eight goals in Marsch’s 11 matches in charge, the head coach has been clear about his desire to increase his options, but it seems Kulenovic is one that got away. Speaking to The Athletic before his call-up, Kulenovic said: “Whoever calls me first, I’ll back their trust in me.”
Having made a summer transfer from Slovan Liberec of the Czech Republic to Heracles in the east of the Netherlands, Kulenovic scored twice last month. For his second goal, a deft run allowed him to quickly dart inside Ajax’s back line to equalise in a game Heracles eventually lost 4-3.
“If you’re thinking (about scoring), that’s when the problems come. You have to live in the moment. I don’t remember the second goal, just running and falling to my knees. I just heard the crowd,” Kulenovic says. “You’re not exactly aware of what you’re doing because you’re not overthinking.”
Many across Canadian soccer could also be accused of not thinking about Kulenovic and his goals.
He has never appeared for Canada at any level, but his brace against Ajax took him to four goals in four games. “Nobody has really talked about (Kulenovic) before that weekend,” former club team-mate and current Canadian Premier League player Noah Jensen says. “That’s the way football in Canada goes sometimes. There’s so many players who fly under the radar.”
So who is this forward on the rise, and how did Canada miss out on him?
Not only can Kulenovic still hear the roar of the Asito Stadion crowd after his two goals against Ajax, if he digs deeper he can hear an even louder roar: that of 66,000 fans at the Allianz Arena in Munich, 18 years earlier.
Just six years old, Kulenovic travelled with his family from Canada back to Germany, where his parents originally emigrated to from Bosnia, for the 2006 World Cup. It was a pilgrimage for Kulenovic to experience the living, breathing game past generations of his family fell for in Europe. A five-goal thriller between Serbia & Montenegro and Ivory Coast was enough to hook Kulenovic for good.
The following year, Kulenovic and his father became two of the first people to register with a Toronto FC fan club in the south end of BMO Field, the Red Patch Boys, for the team’s inaugural season.
Kulenovic developed at the highly-regarded Sigma Academy outside of Toronto. It was then run by Bobby and Costa Smyrniotis, who would go on to coach and manage the most successful Canadian Premier League side in its short history, Forge FC. Kulenovic leaned heavily into the technical side of the game at Sigma. The Smyrniotis brothers took heavy inspiration from the Dutch game in their training sessions. It was these brothers who saw Kulenovic experiencing a wild growth spurt and converted him from an attacking midfielder to a cunning centre-forward. Kulenovic cannot help but wonder if in some way, that prepared him for the success he is having in the Netherlands.
Success, though, didn’t come easily for Kulenovic. When he trialled at Toronto FC’s academy, the club he had grown up idolizing, they quickly cut him loose.
“You grow up thinking ‘It’s TFC and that’s it,’” Kulenovic said.
Long before the CPL was established in 2019, there were just three professional academies in Canada. Young players like Kulenovic often believed their success was tied to limited opportunities. A move to the Islington Rangers youth club allowed him a trip to England in 2015 and the club organized friendlies against Leicester City academy sides in 2015. Kulenovic was still growing into his lanky frame, already standing at 5ft 9in, and could not match the pace of the English game.
His Rangers coach Lee Merricks remembers that time for Kulenovic. “That frustration is what’s driven him on,” Merricks said.
The club also had some of their players trial at Aston Villa’s academy, but a serious flu bug had gripped the Canadian side and with Villa set to play in the FA Cup semi-final days later, the English club grew wary. Kulenovic was quarantined in his room, meaning he could only see his European dream from outside a window.
When he returned to Canada, he was emboldened, but others saw room for growth in his game. Merricks remembers a young Kulenovic being afraid to hurt opposition players who were shorter than him.
“He was a gentle giant. That was the Canadian in him,” Merricks said of Kulenovic. “That was his super power, using his physical strength. We wanted him to use it more.”
Kulenovic’s parents wanted that too, and more. They didn’t see a future for him in the game in Canada. They also wanted him to understand how good of a life he had in Canada. If Kulenovic wanted to make it as a professional, he needed what Merricks calls “hard schooling”.
“Looking back, they were right,” Kulenovic says. “It’s nice now to see a pathway for players not going through an MLS academy. But 10 years ago, there wasn’t anything.”
So at just 15, Kulenovic left Canada on his own to live with family in Bosnia and join Borac Banja Luka’s academy.
“It got me out of my comfort zone,” Kulenovic says. Now, Borac Banja Luka are playing in the UEFA Conference League. But 10 years ago?
“At that time, the club wasn’t very stable,” Kulenovic says. “Football (in Bosnia) can be very political. The facilities were poor. We were renting a fourth-division club’s pitch.
“We had to go to a military base to train on their pitch. And the only reason we got there was because a friend of the club was a commander in the army. After that, we had to go to another fourth-division club’s pitch. And they didn’t want us destroying their pitch, so we had to go to a patch of grass.”
When he would play, Kulenovic would have insults hurled at him because of his parents’ Serbian ethnicity.
“It wasn’t an easy life,” Kulenovic says. Faced with a harder way of life compared to what he was used to in Canada, Kulenovic learned to fight for what he wanted, physically and mentally. Kulenovic became a harder forward to defend against as he utilized his sizeable frame.
And Kulenovic kept scoring. His stock rose as well, playing for clubs in Slovakia, Croatia and the Czech Republic. Playing time didn’t always come as the kid from Canada remained an unknown.
“My perseverance comes down to not wanting to feel like a failure to myself,” he says.
As he moved up the ladder in Europe before landing in the Netherlands, Canada’s men’s national team was going through a state of transition. Former coach John Herdman left the program in 2023 and Marsch was hired nearly a year later.
Marsch has done well to recruit dual nationals. Niko Sigur, Jamie-Knight Lebel and Santiago Lopez are examples of young players with potential who could be in positions to log serious minutes come 2026. But how can a player of Kulenovic’s potential go overlooked?
The opportunities for Canadian players to train in professional environments remain rare. There are three MLS teams with academies and eight CPL teams, all of which have mandated minutes they must give to players under the age of 21. Marsch called 16-year-old Olusola Jimoh — who played for the CPL’s York United — into a training camp on Monday. Jimoh is a Newcastle native but was raised in Brampton.
But there is still a generation of players who fell off the map for national team scouts because they were forced to ply their trade and develop abroad.
“Canada has all these great, promising players,” Forge FC’s Noah Jensen says. “But at the same time, there’s so many players in their teenage years who haven’t even been assessed, are good enough to be playing at a top level, but the football ecosystem in Canada doesn’t allow them to do that. But it is changing.”
Marsch took over a program earlier this year that was lean on financial resources compared to some of its peers, such as the United States Soccer Federation. There are only so many coaches Marsch has to work with who can scout Canadian players abroad.
Kulenovic said no one from Canada Soccer reached out regarding a national team call-up. It’s possible Canada did not see a future for Kulenovic in their program with Jonathan David and Cyle Larin locks as starting forwards under Marsch, but there are still question marks behind those two.
The interest from Bosnia also came together quickly. Kulenovic said representatives from the Football Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina watched just one of his games live, a 2-0 win over NAC Breda on November 2, before presenting him with a plan for his future with the Bosnian national team.
Kulenovic’s goals in the Eredivisie should nudge on more than a few scouts: there are talented Canadian players around the world. How many of them Marsch can recruit will remain a pressing question ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
(Top photo: Peter Lous/BSR Agency/Getty Images)
