Owen Goodman feels as though he’s always been Canadian. To play for the men’s national soccer team, he needed to prove it.

Last month, the 21-year-old goalkeeper received an email from his immigration lawyer in Toronto, asking if he could jump on a Zoom call. Goodman, who was born in England but lived in Alliston, Ont., for eight years as a child, assumed that it was just another update in his arduous quest for citizenship.

“When you’re waiting so long, so long, you start to lose a bit of hope,” he said. “That’s kind of where I was at.”

But the call, it turned out, was the one he’d been waiting for: His childhood residency made him Canadian in the eyes of the government as well as his own. He is in Toronto this week for his first senior international window with the national team, which

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