TORONTO – The NFL has been flirting with the idea of expanding its 32 teams to 33 with a team in London, England.
But first, they should expand to Canada, according to Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com.
Why? There are apparently more fans here.
Silver used Google Trends – a website which tracks how often people search for specific terms – to analyze how many potential NFL fans there were in a number of cities, including Toronto.
He found Toronto has more potential fans than a number of cities which already have an NFL team including Denver, Detroit, and Seattle – the current Super Bowl champions.
Toronto, according to Silver, potentially has 990,000 NFL fans, twice as many as London, England which only has 410,000.
“But the Toronto metro area is highly populous and NFL interest is already reasonably high there,” Silver wrote. “I estimate T Dot has about 1 million NFL fans — more than the majority of U.S. markets to host an NFL team. As with the Raptors and Blue Jays in their sports, there could also some residual gains in NFL interest across the rest of Canada.”
The NFL did have a brief relationship with Toronto, having the Buffalo Bills play one regular seasons home game at the Rogers Centre between 2008 and 2013.
The Bills lost all but one game (the team haven’t made the playoffs since 1999).
The scheduled 2014 game was postponed and the team’s new owners, Terry and Kim Pegula are working to end the commitment altogether.
The games were originally well-attended but never sold out. The Rogers Centre holds approximately 54,000 people and the game attracted 52,134 in 2008. But attendance dropped off almost every year to just 38,969 in 2013.
Nearly 83,603 fans filled Wembley Stadium in London during the recent Dallas Cowboys vs. Jacksonville Jaguards game.
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