David Choinière is a CF Montréal fan and, naturally, a lifelong fan of his younger brother.
But not this week.
When Choinière’s Forge FC tangles with Montreal in the TELUS Canadian Championship quarter-finals before a thunderous throng of school kids Tuesday morning, not only will it be the fourth straight year the two sides have met in the national championship, it will be the third straight year Choinière will play against his brother Mathieu, with whom he played in Montreal’s academy system, and also the big club, from 2011-2017.
Although they play a different kind of game – David is more daring, Mathieu has a calmer style – the Brothers Choinière are so close they even share the same birthday, two years apart. The senior sibling is David, now 27 and in his sixth season as a Hammer.
And because their respective teams compete in different leagues—they can only meet in the national championships or Concacaf Champions Cup – David can freely root for Montréal, other than over the next two weeks. (The second leg of the two-game home-and-home set is in Montreal, on May 22).
“Oh yeah, I cheer for them,” he says. “I grew up there, I was formed there as a player for seven years. I signed my first professional contract there. They’re always going to be a part of my heart. It’s my childhood team.”
The Choinières grew up in the southern Quebec village of Saint Alexandre, near the Vermont border. They were good athletes and played hockey, but once David discovered soccer, he realized he’d found his sport and Mathieu got interested too. They played for endless hours on a small patch of grass in the family yard.
When they were 14 and 12, they moved and were accepted into the youth academy of the Montreal Impact, the previous name of the MLS franchise, and moved 45 minutes north with their mother, Danielle, to share an apartment with another academy player.
That lasted two years, and as her sons learned to cook and established a disciplined daily routine of school and soccer, Danielle returned home to work, and the brothers, aged 16 and 14, lived on their own. They lived near their school and the training grounds so were focused on those two pursuits. On the weekends, they’d go home and stock up on home-cooked meals to carry back to Montreal.
“It was a lot, but we made it work,” David says.
Extremely well. In 2016, David became the first Impact player to graduate from the club’s academy and into the pro team which played in the USL, and then onto the MLS squad. Mathieu was the first to play at all five age-class levels for Montreal, and make it to the No. 1 team, arriving in the MLS in 2017. But by then, David was out with an ankle injury, so they didn’t play together as pros.
When Montreal wanted to send David to its Ottawa Fury affiliate in 2018, he decided instead to gamble on his future and join League1 Ontario’s Sigma in Mississauga because he knew that club owners Costa and Bobby Smyrniotis were going to be running a new team in a new pro league in Hamilton the following season. He’s been here ever since and has become renowned for scoring big goals at big times, like in Canadian championships and international competitions.
Surgery on a torn meniscus limited him to 19 appearances and two goals last year, but he’s back healthy and scoring big goals again: including a pair in Week 2, and another in last week’s Canadian Championship opening round against York United.
“I’m fully happy with my decision to come to Forge,” he says. “I’ve had so many great moments here. We travel a lot with this team, we have a lot of different competitions with this team. I’m really happy with who I am right now, where I am in my life. I’m just trying to get better every day and build on it.”
David meanwhile worked the midfield for CF Montréal, led the low-scoring team in MLS goals last year with five, and played for the MLS all-star team last year against British side Arsenal. It was reported last week that he’d asked for a trade but his head coach Laurent Courtois said that was part of normal negotiations for expiring contracts and that the club not only wanted to keep him, Mathieu himself wanted to stay. Mathieu could not be reached for comment on that issue this week.
The Choinières were scheduled to face each other in the semifinals of the 2021 national tournament but Mathieu was hurt. Arguably, Hamilton should have won that game, but it was scoreless and the visitors prevailed 8-7 in penalty kicks, with the shootout going right down to the 11th men: the goalkeepers. Neither keeper knew they would have to take part and were surprised when they were called to the spot. Forge’s Triston Henry went first but was stopped by Montreal’s Sebastian Breza, who then won it with his turn.
But when Montreal won 3-0 in 2022 and 2-0 last year – both single-elimination games, and both in Montreal — the Choinières each started.
“In both games, he played right midfield and I’m a right winger, so it’s kind of the opposite side of the field,” David recalls. “We crossed paths there a couple of times during the game, but when the game is on, you don’t really think about it.
“I remember running beside him. I’m not a talker when I play, so I didn’t say anything but just knowing that it’s your brother beside you, it’s kind of a strange feeling. But you have to put that aside and focus on the game.
“We talked before the games: it’s just a proud moment for the family. We’ve been working at it since we were so young. It’s always been our dream to play professional soccer. And my parents (Danielle and Daniel) are so proud. When we play it’s the best day of the year for them, they love it. Both their sons doing what they love, playing against each other at the professional level.”
Both brothers say that the experience of living with each other without a parent in the apartment helped them adjust to the responsibilities of a full-time soccer career earlier than most others.
David usually only returns to Quebec over the Christmas holidays, so he and Mathieu don’t play against each other anymore on that little patch of grass in the backyard because it’s covered in snow. But they train together at a local indoor stadium.
CF Montréal is in the midst of a gruelling stretch of five games in 15 days, four of them against top MLS teams. They’re coming off a 4-1 loss in Nashville on Saturday, play Hamilton Tuesday, host Lionel Messi and Inter Miami on Saturday, play Columbus four days later, and three days after that visit arch-rival Toronto FC.
Since beating Miami, playing without Messi, in early March, Montréal has just one victory to go with a pair of wins and four losses. They haven’t won in their last three games, and have lost four of their last five road games. They’ve had trouble scoring goals and have let up a bit early and late in both halves: more than half of the goals they’ve allowed have come in the first or final 10 minutes of a half.
Mathieu Choinière leads the team with three assists, but the top goal scorers over 11 games are Matías Cóccaro with only three and Ariel Lassiter and Josef Martínez with a pair apiece. And the Uruguayan Cóccaro will be out a few more weeks with injury.
Still, this is a quality side with a payroll about eight times as high as the CPL’s $1.2 million salary cap. With Montreal sitting just outside a playoff spot, this period of high-quality MLS East Conference opponents will likely impact what kind of lineup they field Tuesday morning.
“We are playing them for the fourth time so we have experience at it,” David Choinière says. “We know that even if we play against—I’ll call them their B team—we know we have to face a very good team. The good story is that you have nothing to lose when you’re the underdog. You have everything to win. I think we can take a lot from that and embrace the challenge and go for it.”
Hamilton had trouble the last two meetings moving through the Montreal midfield, but if they can replicate how they’ve played for most minutes of their first four CPL matches, all wins, and even in scoring twice in two legs against Guadalajara in January, perhaps they can make the visitors nervous and nudge them off their game. And they’ll have the vocal winds at their backs in the form of more than 11,000 screaming School Day Match kids.
The Hammers have been outstanding on the attacking flanks with Choinière and his teammate of five seasons Tristan Borges almost psychic in their feel for each other. Choinière’s goal, the game’s second, in the opening round against York, involved five touches, and four different players, around the box. If they get that kind of chance, they have to bury it. Make the MLS side chase the game, if possible.
Choinière can always sense his intuitive rapport with Borges.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “We’ve been playing together since Year 1. In the past, I used to be on the right and he used to be on the left. Now he’s playing in the midfield close to me. We know each other so well now, we know the movement, we know our rotation, and we know the quality we have. It’s just a matter of showing up and trusting each other and just letting it happen. I know his strengths, he knows mine, it’s just natural.
“Our team has flow to our game right now, the offence is firing on the opposition. I think we need to keep building on it, working on small details and not get complacent. And stay on the ball.”
Bobby Smyrniotis said today he’d like to have both brothers on his team and credited each of them for their professionalism on and off the pitch.
Daniel and Danielle won’t be at their sons’ Tuesday’s game, but they’ll be in Montreal for the second leg. And David says that while Tuesday is all business, he and Mathieu will talk about it afterward. They’re still very close.
“We still have good chemistry and a great relationship,” David says. “We try to spend as much time together as possible.
“He’s my brother.”
HAMMERS AND NAILS: Commendable sweep by Forge’s Bobby Smyrniotis, Tristan Borges, and Chris Kalongo as CPL manager, player, and goalkeeper of the month … Sunusi Ibrahim has four of the five goals Montréal has scored against Hamilton in the last two years … the first CPL player sold to an MLS side, former Cavalry FC Joel Waterman, is with Montréal, as is stopper Jonathon Sirois who played two years for Valour FC … tickets for Tuesday morning’s game are still available at https://forgefc.canpl.ca/tickets/.