Over the last few years, a variety of sports have experienced huge growth in Canada, and it appears that hockey is no longer the only game in town. Whilst it remains the sport with the most professional major league teams with seven competing in the NHL, we are seeing growth in both viewership and participation for a multitude of others.
Canada’s climate means that Hockey’s appearance at the top of the list comes as no surprise and the sport itself is synonymous with the Canadian identity. The 2018 NHL playoffs were viewed by 68% of the population and over 40% of the players in the league call the Great White North home. It is also no surprise that sports betting in Canada is very popular amongst Hockey fans. However, the participatory numbers have taken a slight dip in recent years, allowing different sport to come through and capture the attention of new fans.
Soccer is Gaining Ground
Soccer has seen a huge boost in terms of numbers. In fact, it has become so popular that it now leads the way in participation, mainly amongst children with over 2 million people playing regularly. One of the biggest contributing factors to this is how kinder the sport is to parents’ pockets. It costs less than CAD $700 a year to pay for a child’s soccer equipment, lessons, league, and ground fees whilst hockey will set you back around $1,200 a year. This means that it is much more accessible to kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds, thus welcoming more players. The professional game has also grown which is evidenced by the growing crowd sizes. The Vancouver Whitecaps, the best supported of the three Canadian teams in Major League Soccer, recorded an increase of 5% per year in annual attendance between 2011 and 2018.
This has also been aided by the emergence of top Canadian talent in European soccer. Jonathan David has become one of the best strikers in the French Ligue 1 and defender Alphonso Davies is amongst the best Left Backs in the world right now, accented by his Champions League win with Bayern Munich at the end of the 2019-2020 season.
Soccer is not the only sport that has experienced such growth, however. Here are five others with an emerging popularity.
Lacrosse
Lacrosse has been many Canadians’ summer sport of choice for years. On the world stage, they are amongst the best and continue to compete with neighbours the USA for supremacy. The sport got a huge boost in popularity when it was recognized as an official Olympic sport for the Summer games in July 2021 and is sure to see big rise in participation numbers because of it.
Cricket
Once upon a time Cricket was actually considered the number one sport in Canada, until Ice Hockey came along in the early 20th century. It appears that it is now back on the rise however, with 40,000 cricket players in the country. They are not yet able to play test matches but in 2018 they got the approval from International Cricket Council to start Global T20 Canada, the first franchise based Twenty20 league in North America.
Tennis
Tennis is quickly becoming one of the leading sports in Canada, with over 6.5 million people heading down to the court in 2018. The rise of Canadian stars in the sport such as Milos Raonic, Eugenie Bouchard, Denis Shapovalov and Bianca Andreescu has inspired people around the country to pick up a racket and try it for themselves.
Baseball
The first boom for baseball in Canada came in the early 90s, when the Toronto Blue Jays won back-to-back world series titles. A major drought since then saw the popularity of the game wear off slightly, along with the fact that the Blue Jays remain the only Canadian team in the MLB. However, minor league participation is up with 75 cities and towns homing leagues. This participation number is still increasing by around 14% each year and we could be in for yet another boom period.
Basketball
Whilst only the sixth most popular sport in the country, there has been a lot more excitement around the sport since the Toronto Raptors’ NBA finals win in 2019, the first time a Canadian team ever won the coveted prize. Around 354,000 young people aged between 3 to 17 play basketball in Canada and an influx of US immigrants have bought their love of the game with them. Now the country has a Canadian team in the league that they can get truly excited about, participation and attendances are going up. It also helps that Drake, arguably the biggest male artist in the world, is sitting courtside at most games.
75 years ago the @NBA tipped off in Toronto.
It’s only right that 75 years to the date we play the @nyknicks again. #NBA75
It’s @TangerineHoops Raptors Game Day pic.twitter.com/9064p2X6qv
— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) November 1, 2021
(The Raptors paying tribute to 75 years in the NBA)
Whilst Ice Hockey still just about reigns supreme when it comes to viewership, participation numbers in a multitude of other sports are creating healthy competition.
We can only hope that this will reflect on the world stage as Canada looks to prove their sporting prowess.
