Toronto FC’s Shaffelburg ready to take flight as a wingback

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While speed has always been of the essence in soccer, when it comes to playing out wide, it is especially critical.

So it was with something approaching disappointment that Toronto FC’s resident burner, Jacob Shaffelburg, discovered his sprinting speed had only been graded as 80 out of 100 on the latest instalment of the ever-popular FIFA video game.

“I think I could be up a bit more than 80, maybe like 84, I don’t know,” said the 22-year-old Nova Scotian, who considers himself more of a Call of Duty guy when it comes to gaming. “I don’t know what all the speeds are on there but I think that more than 80 would be great.”

As a relative unknown who capped a breakout 2021 Major League Soccer campaign with a late-season call-up to the Canadian national team for a pair of World Cup qualifiers, he is well aware of the importance of speed. In fact, he had a front-row seat to the human drag race that was Alphonso Davies against Panama last October, subbing on for the fastest player in the Bundesliga shortly after the Bayern Munich star had torched the visiting defence for arguably the greatest solo goal in Canadian men’s soccer history.

“He’s crazy fast,” Shaffelburg said with a laugh. “It’s insane.”

But just like the metamorphosis Davies underwent during his tenure with the Vancouver Whitecaps some years back, Shaffelburg is also being asked to develop the defensive side of his game. New TFC head coach Bob Bradley is looking to transition to a team whose attack is built around wingbacks getting up and down the field.

As you might expect for a player who was given the nickname Giggsy, after legendary Manchester United winger Ryan Giggs, by a Welsh couple who lived with Shaffelburg’s parents for a while, the transition to left wingback is going against an almost innate attacking nature.

“It’s going to be a challenge for him,” said his father, Mike. “He never played defence his whole life.”

With three goals and three assists in 20 appearances last year, Shaffelburg eventually made an impression in an otherwise off year for a team that is used to challenging for honours. The midseason change of head coaches, from Chris Armas to Javier Perez, didn’t help, and Shaffelburg ended up getting minutes in less than half the matches.

“I kind of felt pretty down there because it didn’t feel like I was going to get a chance to play so that was a rough patch for me, obviously,” Shaffelburg said.

While there is a certain amount of trepidation about the position change, he credits Bradley, already his fourth head coach in just over three years at TFC, with trying to make the transition as easy as possible.

“I think he knows I’m a bit of an over thinker,” he said. “So he’s trying to keep it pretty simple and just easy for me to take it in stride and kind of learn it a bit each day.”

Bradley has given Shaffelburg a “B plus” for his work during training camp and the preseason, while team captain Michael Bradley, Bob’s son, says the youngster’s position on the pitch is sort of irrelevant. At the end of the day, he has the right skillset to help TFC move on from last year’s aberration.

“It doesn’t really matter whether he’s playing a little bit deeper, a little bit higher,” Michael Bradley said. “He’s a really good player and wherever he gets used he can help us.”

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In many ways, Shaffelburg has already defied the odds, finding his way into professional soccer from Port Williams, N.S., where he grew up playing street hockey alongside friend and neighbour Drake Batherson, the second-leading scorer on the Ottawa Senators this season.

With the Halifax Wanderers and the Canadian Premier League a long way from coming into existence, and no real avenues to pursue a pro career, Shaffelburg chose to leave the province at 15 to attend Berkshire School, a private co-ed preparatory school in Massachusetts.

“For me growing up it was difficult,” he said. “I felt like I had no kind of help or no real pathway to become a pro from Nova Scotia, so that’s why I chose to go away,” he said of a province more famous for producing NHL players such as Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon.

“But hopefully now more people are seeing that I guess it’s not just hockey there.”

With TFC’s MLS season kicking off this Saturday on the road at FC Dallas and the tantalizing proposition of a World Cup in Qatar in November – should the Canadian men put the final touches on qualification – there is much for Shaffelburg to play for. However, he has missed out on selection for the past two international windows.

But he is not about to get ahead of himself. With a new position to master – Canadian head coach John Herdman told Shaffelburg he sees him as more of a wingback in the national-team set-up – there is much work to be done before anyone is boarding a plane to Qatar. And with the men’s national team up to 33rd in the latest FIFA world ranking, roster spots are tougher to come by.

“It’s a really hard, hard team to get on to,” Shaffelburg said. “So I’ve got to play well to even be in the mix. So once we come to that point, then we’ll see.”