Neither do I.
And yet the Grey Cup is the most-watched television program in Canada. More than 6 million people watched last year's Grey Cup from start to finish and more than 14 million people (43% of the population) watched part of the game:
http://www.thestar.com/sports/football/c...7--zelkovich-grey-cup-a-ratings-champion
Your problem is you are committing the logical fallacy of assuming that what we play as children is what we will spend our entertainment dollars on as adults. This is a grave mistake.
I'm assuming eventually soccer will pass CFL, at lease in Montreal and Vancouver, I just never said when.
For instance, how many Vancouver kids do you personally know play ice hockey? Probably none. How many Vancouver elementary or secondary schools have ice hockey teams? Definitely none. Yet an ice hockey team is Vancouver's premiere professional sports franchise.
Actually I know quite a few kids that play hockey for Burnaby minor, BWC, NVWC, Vancouver Thunderbirds, vancouver minor.
No elementary school has ice hockey teams, elementary schools only have Volleyball and basketball teams really.
My secondary school has a team, and 5 other Vancouver public secondary schools have a team....
Soccer, by contrast, has
always been one of the most widely played sports by kids in Vancouver. (It is
not a new phenomenon, as you seem to think.) I grew up in the seventies and soccer was the main organized sport played during the fall. I and everyone I knew played soccer for our entire childhoods. Yet professional soccer (with a brief exception during the late seventies/early eighties) has largely failed to attract significant interest in Vancouver or North America.
Because we don't develop good talent and we don't have the best players.
What sports we play as children is mainly a function of what our parents find the least expensive to equip and the most physically beneficial. Soccer is that sport. But what we spend our entertainment dollars on as adults is purely a function of what we find
entertaining to watch as adults. Unless it can evolve and improve itself (i.e., change certain rules to make the game more exciting and more palatable to North American sensibilities), soccer is
not that sport for most people in North America.
So more violent? Anyways, I'm just saying that with large immigration and most likely hood that second generations/third generations of immigrants will more likely choose soccer. Don't get me wrong I don't hate the CFL, I like it and I defend it while talking to my friends from the US.
That said, there
is a market for professional soccer in Vancouver, and with the arrival of MLS, interest in professional soccer will increase even more. But it is wishful thinking to hope that the Whitecaps FC will ever overtake the B.C. Lions in popularity.
If the white caps, succeed, get major talent, develop locally then they will become much more popular. It takes time to develop certain sports and that was the case with the NHL, and it will be the case with MLS. Don't forget MLS is still a pretty young league.
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