Pacific FC and Merriman part ways. What comes next for the club?
The James Merriman era has ended at Pacific FC. On Wednesday, May 21, the Langford, BC-based club announced it was parting ways with its longest-tenured head coach, following a "mutual termination." The move for PFC comes after a 17-match winless streak dating back to August 10, 2025, and amid an ongoing search for new owners for the Canadian Premier League club.
Merriman joined Pacific FC's coaching staff in its inaugural season, serving as assistant coach under Michael Silberbauer and later Pa-Modou Kah. The Nanaimo-born coach was appointed as PFC's head coach in 2022. In his four seasons at the helm, Merriman led Pacific FC to three playoff appearances and two trips to the Canadian Championship semifinal, but struggled to find results after missing the playoffs in 2025.
Pacific FC announced that assistant coach Yiannis Tsalatsidis will assume head coaching duties for Sunday's match against Cavalry FC, and that "information regarding the appointment of a new head coach will be forthcoming."
End of seven-season run for Pacific FC and Merriman
A native of Vancouver Island and former collegiate soccer player with the University of Denver, Merriman joined the Tridents in August 2018. At the time, he'd been working as a residency coach with the Vancouver Whitecaps. Merriman told CanPL.ca that he was initially "curious" about the CPL and the rumours of a West Coast club, but the news of Josh Simpson's involvement in the ownership group won him over.
"When I found out [the club] was going to be on Vancouver Island, obviously, too many things were aligning for me not to become interested in that move," he said.
Merriman was announced alongside Silberbauer on August 20, 2018, and eventually took on the brief duty of interim head coach when the Tridents fired Silberbauer before the last match of the 2019 season. (I was living in Victoria and writing for CanPL.ca at the time. Pacific FC co-owner Rob Friend told me the change, after a middling season, was about "shaking it up and letting everyone know that everyone's job is on the line.")
Merriman's first tenure as PFC's head coach lasted a single match—a 2-0 win over Valour FC—before the Tridents brought in Kah, a fiery personality and Major League Soccer veteran who vowed to turn Pacific FC's fortunes around by building a culture where "no individual ... is bigger than the group." Kah, who ended his near-20-year playing career with the Whitecaps, was a familiar face to Merriman: The two got to know one another coaching in the Whitecaps' residency program, travelling with the U-18s, exchanging football philosophies, and taking their U.S. coaching license together.
"We see the game the exact same way," Merriman told me in 2021.
In Merriman and Kah, the Tridents found a winning combination: Kah, naturally outspoken, could light a fire under his players, while the surfer-mellow Merriman served as the locker-room counterbalance.
"When he comes in hard … I’ll try to lighten it up or come at it from a different angle," Merriman said.
(PFC also helped its winning chances by overhauling its roster, bringing in Alejandro Díaz, Marco Bustos, Josh Heard, Jamar Dixon, Thomas Meilleur-Giguère, and Callum Irving in 2020; and Manny Aparicio and Ollie Bassett in 2021.)
The Tridents rode the coaching pair's success to a Canadian Premier League title in 2021, beating Forge FC 1-0 in Hamilton and even toppling the Whitecaps in a thriller at Starlight Stadium en route to a Canadian Championship semifinal appearance against Toronto FC.
Highs and lows in Langford
Pacific FC appointed Merriman as the club's head coach in January 2022. (Kah, upon winning the North Star Shield and CPL Coach of the Year honours in 2021, left for a head coaching role with MLS Next Pro's North Texas SC.) Merriman inherited a roster with significant departures to replace: Lukas MacNaughton and Kadin Chung left for Toronto FC, Ollie Bassett departed for Atlético Ottawa, and Terran Campbell and Alessandro Hojabrpour—one, the club's all-time leading scorer, and the other, the newly minted CPL U-21 Canadian Player of the Year—joined the team they'd just beaten in Forge FC. Co-owners Rob Friend and Dean Shillington also shifted focus to a new project: launching Vancouver FC.
"I know it was a lot of transition this off-season, from the outside looking in," Merriman told me ahead of the 2022 season. "Internally, we still have great people in our staff that are continuing. And we have a great group of core players returning."
(For the third year running, Pacific FC also managed to secure the league's highest-profile free agent, bringing in FC Edmondon centre-back Amer Didić to replace MacNaughton.)
Merriman and his new charges wasted little time in making their mark: PFC won five of its first seven matches in 2022 and didn’t lose its fifth match until Week 20. From July to mid-August, the Tridents rallied off five straight wins, scoring 13 goals. The club reached the CONCACAF League's Round of 16, narrowly missing out on a quarterfinal appearance after losing in penalties to Costa Rica's CS Herediano. Approaching the final stretch of the season, the Tridents sat tied atop the CPL table with 32 points. And then, the club sold its most prolific performer in Alejandro Díaz, who, in 2022 alone, had racked up 16 goals and 3 assists in 21 matches. PFC couldn't quite muster its same offensive firepower afterward.
Even without Díaz, Merriman and PFC finished the 2022 season with a club-record 46 points—three points shy of first-place Ottawa. The Tridents held the edge in their regular-season series with Atlético, but fell 3-1 on aggregate in the CPL semifinal. It would remain Merriman's best season at Pacific's helm, but other highs followed.
PFC signed Merriman to a three-year contract extension in June 2023 after another hot start to the CPL season. The Tridents won seven of their first 11 games in 2023, at one point riding a nine-game unbeaten streak. Pacific reached the Canadian Championship semifinal after defeating Cavalry FC and TSS Rovers FC, only to fall 3-0 to the Vancouver Whitecaps.
"We were just willing to do the work, no matter if it was fun or not, to get points," Wanderers centre-back Thomas Meilleur-Giguère, who made 120 appearances for Pacific FC, told me in December 2024.
The Tridents finished the 2023 season in fourth, with 40 points, then made a run to the playoff semifinals after back-to-back victories over York United FC and the Halifax Wanderers. PFC reached the play-in round in 2024, only to fall to York United. Then, in 2025—amid a public dispute between the club and the City of Langford, which owns Starlight Stadium; untimely injuries to signings Ronan Kratt and Juan Quintana; and an ongoing search for new owners—the Tridents missed the playoffs entirely. The club hasn't won a match since.
Off-pitch issues overshadow club's performance
It would be unfair to pin Pacific FC's results squarely on Merriman's head coaching merits. In the last 26 months, the Vancouver Island club's on-field performance has been overshadowed by a number of off-the-pitch matters involving its ownership group, SixFive Sports & Entertainment—ranging from claims of debts owed to the ongoing search for buyers.
The first bombshell report came in March 2024, when Transfermarkt's Manuel Veth reported that, according to sources, both Pacific FC and Valour FC were for sale. PFC's ownership shot down those claims within days.
"The team is not for sale," co-owner Dean Shillington told the Northern Tribune. "Further, there would be a formal process around that kind of exercise for us, and there currently is no sales process happening. Instead, we are focused on the season ahead."
Seventeen months later, Pacific FC's owners announced they were, in fact, putting the club up for sale—and were looking for buyers who would keep the Tridents on Vancouver Island. (Valour FC folded two months later, in November 2025.)
"This is not an easy one for me but every ownership has a life cycle," Pacific FC co-owner Josh Simpson told the Times-Colonist. "This is not a distress situation. It's an exciting, positive move."
There were things that suggested otherwise.
On September 19, 2025, two days after Pacific FC went public with its search for new owners, the City of Langford issued a news release, claiming that PFC owed the municipality over $90,000 for "unpaid office rent, stadium rental fees, and game-related costs," along with an additional $691,477.77 under the "Indoor Training Centre agreement," for the $5-million indoor field house built on land leased from Langford. The municipality claimed PFC also owed "more than $24,000" to the City's field operator and food and beverage provider. The City of Langford further claimed Pacific FC had been "largely unresponsive to emails and phone calls to resolve the outstanding debts until it requires a renewed stadium use contract with the City."
Pacific FC dispelled the City of Langford's claims later the same day, in an Instagram post.
"Our business is strong, and all our financial commitments are being met or are part of active discussions with the City of Langford," PFC wrote in response. "We are committed to working constructively with Langford and believe that continued direct dialogue, not public exchanges, is the best way to move forward."
More controversy followed across the Georgia Strait.
In December 2025, former Vancouver FC head coach Afshin Ghotbi filed a lawsuit against SixFive—which also owns the Fraser Valley club—alleging that he'd loaned the club $500,000 to help with "cash-flow challenges," which they hadn't repaid. He claimed that SixFive and managing partner Dean Shillington owed him $715,879.45 in principal and interest, and that his attempts to seek repayment were met with "excuses, justifications and requests for more time." (SixFive disputes Ghotbi's claims, and in a January 2026 counterclaim, summarized Ghotbi's civil suit as a form of "blackmail by litigation.")
Search for new owners continues
In isolation, Merriman's departure from Pacific FC ought not to surprise league observers: The Tridents have not met expectations on the pitch after bringing back the likes of Marco Bustos, Alejandro Díaz, and Kadin Chung. After six CPL matches, the club sits at the bottom of the table with a single point—a plucky draw against the Wanderers in Halifax's season opener. PFC has been outscored by 12 goals to six.
And yet, the move would have seemed far likelier to come with the introduction of a new ownership group—see York United and Martin Nash, for one—or, at the very least, at the end of this season. Merriman remains on Pacific's books until the end of 2026. The club could have let his contract run its course, watched how the chips fall, and decided on Merriman's future after another season. Woeful as the Tridents' start has been, they are still just six points out of the playoff picture. (Granted, PFC's owners might see that six-point margin and the remaining 22 matches to play as the very reason to have acted early in changing coaches.)
With a caretaker coach in Yiannis Tsalatsidis, a former opposition analyst with Cavalry FC and a coach with the University of Saskatchewan's women's soccer program, Pacific FC have—for the time being, anyway—handed the reins to a first-time professional head coach. It remains to be seen if Tsalatsidis is part of the front office's long-term plans, much as it remains to be seen if the front-office itself will have fresh faces by the end of 2026.
For now, Tsalatsidis can count Nash as a believer. Speaking with Northern Tribune before Tsalatsidis was hired to coach FC London in 2022, the current Vancouver FC head coach—who worked with Tsalatsidis at Cavalry—described the latter as having an "incredible eye for the game," and an "ability to recognize teams' strengths and weaknesses."
Sunday will mark the beginning of Tsalatsidis's tenure as the fourth coach in PFC's history. How long it lasts will depend, in part, on how quickly he harnesses his own club's strengths and finds those weaknesses among his CPL opponents. But it will also depend, in greater part, on Pacific FC's future.
Further reading:
Josh Healey
Josh Healey
Josh Healey
