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.