This year an estimated 180-200 million people will tune in to watch the Super Bowl. Around 120 million of those will be located in the United States with the remainder coming from overseas. A large proportion of those overseas viewers will be here in Canada, where the NFL is incredibly popular.
It’s not just the on-field action that proves popular with Canadian sports fans. It’s the drama that surrounds the game in general, the hype of events like the halftime show and of course the endless streams of content that come from the game. Then of course there are the huge amounts of people that bet on NFL spreads.
In this article we explore the ideas mentioned in the previous paragraph in detail as we attempt to answer definitively why the NFL is so popular in Canada.
Rising Popularity: A Myth or a Fact?
For the majority of Canadians hockey remains the most popular sport in the hockey, and any idea that the sport could be overtaken by football is seen as sacrilege. That doesn’t detract from the fact that football is growing in Canada.
By almost every measure it is the second most popular sport in the country. Domestically, the Canadian Football League saw rising attendances last year with a total of 459,119 people attending regular and playoff season games combined to make an average game attendance of 46,526.
Whilst the CFL is by no stretch a farmer’s league, it isn’t of the same quality of the NFL, so the fact that it can attract such high crowds is testament to the popularity of the game in Canada. In addition to that, viewing figures from Canada are growing year on year for regular NFL games and, of course, the showpiece Super Bowl clash itself.
(52,349 fans packed into B.C. Place to watch this year’s Grey Cup.)
Why Canadians Love the NFL
In simple terms, Canadians have a great affinity with the sport of football and as a result like to watch the biggest football league on the planet. It really is as simple as that. Much in the same way that American soccer fans attend MLS games, but still get up in the early hours of the morning to watch their favourite English Premier League side in action, Canadians attend local games but then tune into the NFL to follow their team.
For Canadians though, the NFL is far more accessible than the Premier League is to American soccer fans. The time differences aren’t as harsh, and the game itself is more readily accepted in the country and is therefore easier to follow and get a hold of. There’s no trawling through channels, buying niche subscriptions or VPN magic needed, it’s effectively plug in and play.
The Future of the NFL in Canada
If recent trends of viewing figures and CFL attendances are anything to go by then we can expect the popularity of football to continue to grow in Canada, particularly the NFL. Whilst it still has some way to go to overtake hockey as the number one sport, it will consolidate its spot as the country’s second favourite game.
With that, calls for an NFL expansion team in Canada will continue to grow louder and more persistent. Spoken about for decades already, the idea of a team from north of the American border competing in the NFL is one that is popular both with Americans and Canadians.
The appetite is definitely there as is the will to build the facilities that would enable it to happen. All that is needed is more time and patience. Although a growing concern for the supporters of a Canadian team in the NFL is that with every passing year, the popularity of the CFL will continue to grow.
Could it reach a stage where the CFL is so popular that there are powerful internal voices of opposition to an NFL expansion team? Critics who perhaps rightly say that an NFL team here in Canada would be tremendously damaging to the domestic game? Perhaps, and if those critics want to be overcome then it is better to act sooner rather than later.
(Forget an expansion, how amazing would an NFL – CFL merger be!?)
In Summary
The NFL is popular all around the globe, but it is no surprise that the country with the second biggest audience for the league is Canada. Not only are we close neighbours to America, but we also share an awful lot in common with those south of the border, particularly in our sporting tastes.
And hey, perhaps the idea of a Canadian expansion team will be completely moot if President Trump gets his way and makes us the 51st state. Hopefully not though ey?