Quote:
Originally Posted by DirtyMike
I can't see Calgary ever getting an MLS team. Calgary sports fans are notoriously fickle, and besides the Stamps and Flames, no other teams have gotten any major support. Even those two have gone through some pretty lean times in the last 15 years.
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Comparing Calgary to the "big three" in our "big three":
NHL - Montreal is unbeatable, but Calgary has consistently matched Toronto in each of the past five years, and done either similar or better numbers than Vancouver.
CFL - Calgary consistently averages higher attendance than Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal (though they are similar with Montreal in regards to % of capacity).
NLL - Calgary averages much better attendance than Vancouver, and about equivalent to Toronto.
All that is with having a population that has 1-4 million LESS people, depending on which city you're looking at. For our population, Calgary supports franchises big (NHL) and small (NLL) as well as any other Canadian city. I think they'd pull in the 19,000 AVG attendance for MLS.
If Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto are acceptable places for the MLS, so is Calgary. We've proven our ability to support high-level sport similarly and even regularly better than those cities. I just don't like the outdated myth that Calgary is a bad place for major sports.