The Conference Board of Canada released a neat report* yesterday, speculating on what the market for pro sports could look like in Canada come 2035. Hint, if you like pro sports it will look good!
Three more NHL teams. The return of Major League Baseball to Montreal and the NBA to Vancouver. A whopping seven more CFL teams from coast to coast. And finally, three more MLS sides, in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa.
But as usual soccer in Canada gets ghettoized. The authors trot out the diversity card as a premise behind their conclusion. Now, it's by no means malicious. The economists responsible for this report aren't journalists scared about something they don't entirely understand. But they do get caught up in the same tired narrative. From the report:
Population diversity comes into play as an important factor in the rise of soccer’s popularity, since most immigrants come from countries where soccer is the traditional favourite sport.
The thing is in this case they're just plain wrong.
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A look at the latest data from Statistics Canada shows the three biggest sources of immigration to Canada are South Asia, China and the Philippines. Add in immigrants from the U.S. and South Korea and you're at 45% of all immigrants who came to Canada between 2001 and 2006. And their percentages of the total are growing. Immigration from many European countries, such as Italy and Portugal, has long since slowed to a trickle. Overall immigration from Europe accounted for about 15% of the total during this period, the majority of it from what was traditionally known as Eastern Europe.
Yes, I understand that soccer is relatively popular in South Asia, China and the Philippines. But not nearly as intensely popular as it is in Europe, South America and Africa. Five years of boots on the ground in South Korea tells me that soccer remains a relatively novel popularity in East Asia. Yes, yes.. Drogba, Anelka and the millions flowing into Chinese soccer notwithstanding. It's a growing sport but I still doubt the young Chinese men immigrating to Canada now are bring the same degree of passion for Shanghai Shenhua as Europeans did for Juventus or Benefica in the 1960's. In fact, it's more likely Chinese would arrive with a passion for basketball, but that wasn't mentioned as a possible reason the NBA could return to Vancouver.
Soccer is popular in India, but not nearly as popular as cricket. And I'm vaguely aware that soccer is not worshiped in the Philippines with anything like the intensity it is elsewhere in South-East Asia. Feel free to disagree in the comments section.
The point is, I believe it's inaccurate to say that "most immigrants come from countries where soccer is the traditional favourite sport." But back to the Conference Board report:
Moreover, Canada welcomes over 200,000 immigrants a year, a number that should grow as labour force conditions tighten due to an aging workforce, requiring employers to look outside Canada for talent. As a result, the share of the population born abroad will continue to rise, bringing more pro soccer fans to Canada.
Again. An assumption I just don't believe is correct. I can't speak to the situation in Vancouver or Montreal, but would anyone argue the initial surge and relatively sustained popularity of TFC has been driven in any major way by South Asian, Chinese or Filipino immigrants? All of whom are represented in massive numbers in the GTA? Lacking empirical data on the subject, anecdotal evidence tells me that crowds at TFC games remain predominantly white, albeit nowhere close to as white as a Toronto Maple Leafs game.
From TV numbers for both European and MLS matches to attendances at domestic games, we can see that Canadians are supporting soccer. Not always local soccer, but soccer nonetheless. For a long time, the huge wave of post-WWII immigrants from southern Europe and Great Britain and their Canadian-born adult offspring were the main source of soccer interest in this country, especially in its largest metropolitan areas. That's where the stubborn "multicultural/ethnic" media narrative came from, but we're beyond it now.
To keep associating soccer with immigrants masks the slow-but-steady inroads the sport is making into all facets of the population and inaccurately reflects the reality of immigration to Canada today. Most of all it's just a lazy assumption: all those people from "abroad" piling into Canada means we'll soon have a lot of soccer fans! The Conference Board economists should have stuck to rising population and disposable income projections as credible reasons why Canada could eventually support more MLS teams. That would have made a lot more sense.
*The Conference Board's site is down at this moment. I'll post the report as soon as possible.