Quote:
Originally Posted by St. Pats
You make my own point. The Canadian masses aren't begging for anything including the major sports. There is a grand total of one baseball team, one NBA team and zero NFL teams. Hockey is it for the major sports and even on those two teams finding a Canadian player isn't an easy task. Hardly obscure those sports and still the masses ain't begging even for them.
Soccer is the most popular game in the world ---chances of playing it in Canada --very slim and at a mediocre level at best.
Look at the sporting landscape in a country like Australia. Numerous leagues including Yep a women's pro basketball league. Population? 20 mil maybe.
Scotland as another example. Tiny population. Pro soccer league, pro rugby teams etc. Supporting a dozen or so teams in the Scottish Premier League and two rugby teams all with a pop of something around 1/6 of Canada.
Which was my point in the first place and one that you confirmed. The masses in Canada don't have a longing for sports. Major or otherwise.
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That's where you're going to point? Really? A country that goes bat#### for a couple of sports, two of which it plays almost exclusively, and couldn't care less about anything else? That sounds familiar doesn't it?
AFL and NRL games are packed, Super 14 varies by team and season to season and cricket has a decent following for big tests. AFL and NRL passion and attendance is about on par with what Canada has for hockey, and don't try to count that as two national sports because outside of NSW and Queensland people don't care about NRL and in NSW and Queensland the appetite for AFL is relatively small. Canada can add the CFL to it's list, which more than offsets the cricket following in Australia.
Now let's discuss Scotland. Yep, they have second and third (if not below) soccer. Well that's great. And they have some rugby. Okay. And?
The masses in Canada have a longing for plenty of sports, the fact that they aren't women's basketball (which absolutely no country has a longing for, let's see those packed attendance figures for your Australian league) and badminton
doesn't change that. Hockey, football, baseball, basketball and soccer all have large followings in Canada. I can point to second and third tier leagues in each of those sports if you'd like, or I can point you to a sports bar on an evening with a big game in any of those sports being played.
Somehow you've confused the presence of top level sports teams with a passion for a sport. Oddly enough you've also pointed at the presence of lower level teams in other nations as some sort of proof, which is quite convenient. Canada doesn't have an NFL team because there's only one city (maybe 2 with Vancouver) that fits the mold of an NFL city from a financial standpoint. The same goes for MLB and the NBA. That's going to happen when you're a small country and you are talking about the absolute highest level leagues in the world.