Quote:
Originally Posted by Marty_Mcfly
The population within a 250 km radius of Halifax is close to 1.3 million. Can you count on those extra 200,000 people to fill the seats every home game, or do you go with the city with a central population large enough to already support a team?
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The CFL's level of interest in Moncton is pretty telling, even though they supposedly have this big advantage of already having a stadium (though as far as I can tell it would cost about as much to get it to CFL standards as it would to build a new one, and the Moncton stadium has a track).
Even in Regina my understanding is that the vast majority of tickets go to locals.
That Moncton number is a little weird in that it includes all of metro Halifax. In the same way, you could argue that Langley is more central than Vancouver or Worcester is more central than Boston. The radius alone isn't what matters, it's a more complicated mix of how many people there are and how likely they are to travel, which itself depends on distances, travel costs, and desirability.
People in the Maritimes like to downplay how important Halifax is, as if it is just one of a bunch of cities and something like a CFL team could easily go wherever. The fact is though that the city grew by about 8,000 people last year while the rest of the Maritimes in total grew by about 2,000. I was looking at commuter data and in Hants County next door, 46% of workers commute to Halifax. Soon it will be a metro of 500,000 in a region that still has around 1.8 million people, and where the next-largest city is less than half as large.
I agree that there's no guarantee a stadium will be built in Halifax, and a potential CFL team there that has everything ready to go except a stadium is maybe 20% of the way there. A CFL-level stadium is much more affordable to Halifax and NS than it is to other cities and provinces in the region though.