It’s fairly common knowledge that the NFL hasn’t been doing very well in terms of its viewer numbers over the past few seasons. Data visualization site Statista notes that regular season viewership has been continuously declining since 2010 when it recorded 17.9 million viewers. It recorded the same figure in 2015 but the numbers bottomed out at 15 million in 2017. More recently, in 2021, the NFL averaged 17.1 m viewers per game.
Love-Hate Relationship
As America’s number one sport, with 74.5% of sports fans admitting to following the game, the decline isn’t too terrible just yet. By way of comparison, the previous source claims that 56.6% of Americans watch basketball, followed by baseball (50.5%), boxing (23.4%), hockey (22.1%), and soccer (21.6%). The concern is that fast-growing sports, such as pickleball, according to Yahoo!, could one day eclipse the NFL if things continue as they are.
Oddly enough, the NFL’s ability to draw in viewers changes quite dramatically from one season to the next. It lost almost 3 million fans between 2015 and 2017, before gaining almost them all back by 2019. The media paints a very strange picture of the league now. In early 2021, the New York Times claimed that its popularity is “exploding” while, a year later, Forbes lamented the decline in viewership.
To paraphrase a quote from the former newspaper, Americans don’t seem to be able to turn away from the NFL – or, at least, not for very long. The obvious question to ask is whether the same love-hate relationship persists north of the border too, in the CFL. Unfortunately, the evidence seems to suggest that it does. Even in 2017, the National Post was lamenting the lack of interest in the sport in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
The 109th Grey Cup
There is good news. Just like the fickle American fans and the NFL, Canadians aren’t abandoning the CFL in any absolute terms. The 109th Grey Cup averaged 3.2 million viewers overall, a figure that represents an increase of 7.5% over 2021’s event. However, 8.2 million fans tuned in to see the Toronto Argonauts dispatch the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, suggesting that the league’s reputation is still healthy among local viewers.
One recent development in Canada may have impacted CFL viewership: the fresh availability of single-match wagering, which wasn’t possible between the 1960s and 2021. According to the Canadian Gaming Association, the local sports wagering market was worth around $15 billion in 2020 but could balloon to $25 billion before the end of the current decade. That is, according to a white paper from the industry.
Gambling.com lists 20 different sites that accept sports NFL bets from people in Canada, including brands like BetVictor, Sports Interaction, ZetBet, and CobraBet, which has one of Canada’s biggest sports selections. As sports betting is designed to be an accompaniment to the action on the field, there’s bound to be some correlation between new activity in the space and the popularity of the NFL and CFL.
The XFL
A large number of Canadians actually watch both the American and Canadian leagues. The Angus Reid Institute indicates that around 20% of Canadians show interest in both the NFL and CFL. Arguably the more interesting discovery was that there’s a bit of a gulf in age between the people who watch one league or another. Young people prefer the NFL, while the CFL is the domain of older people.
This brings us right back to why the CFL might struggle for viewers in the future. The National Post has already blamed millennials for showing little interest in visiting sports grounds in Canada, which means that the league has an ageing audience. Worse, the CFL is seemingly propped up financially by its TV agreements with TSL. These deals have been considered a bit of a shaky foundation in the past.
In Saskatchewan, which has always been something of a guaranteed friend of the CFL, a column in the local newspaper Sask Today suggested that the league was in such dire straits that it had considered merging with XFL and its Indoor Football League, the former’s minor division. XFL is a very odd prospect, having been founded by WWE Vince McMahon in 2018 before declaring bankruptcy three months later. It’s now owned by Dwayne Johnson, otherwise known as The Rock.
The CFL ended up being surprisingly open about its intention to work with XFL and McMahon, which alarmed fans. While it’s still football, the XFL is an entirely different game. It has a smaller field and four downs per possession (CFL has three, making it a more aggressive game). Overall, though, it’s a much more American game. Long-suffering fans will remember the CFL’s last attempt to change to American rules in the nineties.
Desperation Tactics
Returning to the present, the worry is that disruption in 2020 followed by industrial action in 2021 may have caused the wheels to come off the CFL. Games played since the restart have been low-scoring with frequent stoppages, something that always hampers the entertainment value of Canadian football games. It’s not very easy to see who the CFL’s audience currently is, given the volume of fan concern.
Of course, it’s not quite dead yet and the recent Grey Cup numbers will be reassuring for many fans, even if major events like finals are often poor yardsticks for judging the popularity of something (the CFL gained 5 million viewers that day). The CFL now needs to avoid desperation tactics such as mergers and focus on finding that all-important younger audience. Who knows what would happen if the TV networks pull out?
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