Showing posts with label google trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google trends. Show all posts

Friday, April 18, 2014

More CFL Google Trends Data

In my previous post, I discussed a recent 538 blog post on Google trends data on North American pro sports teams. That article looked at data from 2004 to now. However considering how poor the Ticats were in that era, I was curious how popular they were in 2013 when they managed to make the Grey Cup (the first time since 1999 against Calgary).

Unsurprisingly the Cats were relatively improved. The Riders were top with a score of 21 (they won the Grey Cup which couldn't have hurt). The Eskimos were well back at 11, tied with the Bombers (which seems weird considering the Bombers were terrible, but they have dedicated fans obviously).

The Alouettes and Lions were tied at 9, the Ticats and Stampeders were tied at 8, and Rob Ford's Argos were last at 6.

So the Cats were tied for sixth in the CFL, which is quite respectable considering there's not a lot of fans for Hamilton outside Hamilton, unlike some teams which basically get an entire province. I'm expecting this year to be high partially because soon people will start Googling about how the stadium is progressing. I'm not sure if that qualifies under any publicity is good publicity.

538 Post With CFL Data on Combined With Other North American Sports

Nate Silver's new incarnation has an interesting blog post on the relative internet popularity of North American pro sports that includes both CFL teams and Mexican soccer teams. Obviously I like that they included CFL teams, but I thought including Mexican soccer was interesting as well.

The stats show Google trend data from 2004-2014. Unsurprisingly the Saskatchewan Rough Riders are the most popular of the CFL teams on the internet with a score of 0.27. That's almost as popular as the least popular NBA team, the recently sold Milwaukee Bucks and tied with the St. Louis Blues (admittedly over the past ten years the Blues haven't been a great team in the past decade). They're also more popular than the NHL's Ducks, Lightning, Hurricanes, Coyotes, Predators, Panthers and Blue Jackets. They're way behind Guadalajara of La Liga Mexico. There's two teams in the MLS more popular than the Riders. Toronto FC and the Edmonton Eskimos were tied at 0.23, which was still more popular than five NHL teams.

Unfortunately for the Ticats, they were last in the time period at 0.11 but they were still ahead of 11 MLS teams. In the Ticats defence, the 2004 to 2014 time period was quite poor in terms of wins. That also pretty much coincides with Bob Young's ownership tenure.

After Edmonton, the next more popular teams were the Lions, the Alouettes (who no doubt have had their popularity on Google trends spiked this week by trying out and signing Chad Johnson (who also has a lot of Twitter followers) to a two year contract), the Bombers, the Stampeders and then the Argos at 0.13.

Hopefully with the Ticats' recent success last year the Cats Google trend popularity will increase (although probably matter much revenue wise). Interestingly for Toronto FC, there's a lot of relative internet interest that doesn't convert into much in terms in of Canadian television ratings. However the CFL has the advantage that for each game two Canadian teams are always playing, whereas the Canadian MLS teams are often playing teams like the Columbus Crew who surely don't have a lot of Canadian fans.