Edmonton is guarantee to be a CPL market, but it might not necessarily be Edmonton FC ownership who seems adamant to sink with the NASL ship to recover their investment. Daryl Katz who owns the NHL Edmonton Oilers used to want an MLS franchise, he could look at CPL just like the NHL Calgary Flames are rumored to be involved (they own every sports teams in the city). There's also the CFL Edmonton Eskimos who could step in as bidders. Alberta being a rich province have no shortage of potential investors.
We are at $90M right now. Divide that up by 22 teams and thats just over $4M. That is basically the salary cap we have today. If we were to magically get $200M in the next TV deal with 28 teams, that put each team just over $7M. That would be a decent salary cap.
The right word is magic. The NHL contract with NBC is $2B for 10 years so around $200M per years for the league. The Canadian contract with Rogers is $5.232 billion for 12 years, so over $436M per years from Canada alone. There's no way MLS comes close to that in the near future, especially when EPL makes more money in the US than MLS in regards to TV deals while Liga MX has more viewership than MLS in the US. The MLS TV contract is actually pretty bad for the size of the league. The CFL with only 9 teams have a $40M/per year TV contract with TSN/RDS but teams ends up getting similar amount of money than MLS after splitting the money... I question the economics of the league, many medias does.
In an ideal world NBC would bid for exclusive rights and provide the same quality of coverage as they do for the EPL, plus MLS would get EPL as a lead in. EPL coverage is the shining light of NBC sports. One of the reasons I think the current US TV contract is so bad is that it doesn't seem take into account expansion given that there are already 5 (and should be 6) more teams than there were when it was signed. Also remember that the EPL contract covers all games live for free and there's a 2 hour highlights show. That's 22 hours a week excluding midweek matches. Having to pay extra to see more than 3 games a week seems like bad marketing by MLS. Another option is maybe for MLS to produce themselves in the way Formula One does lowering the costs to the networks.and maybe have their own network like MLB to compensate for lack of media attention elsewhere.
point was that any team other than the big 3 will be small fry (i left out the really big dogs since no canadian team has won MLS yet.)
Demand probably has about 90% to do with it. Pro Soccer has only recently moved beyond cult status and most soccer fans consider MLS to be a minor league product as compared to the big Euro leagues.
When you say the Euro Leagues you mean BL and EPL which are more accessible than MLS. The top 3 in La Liga get good ratings on the Spanish channels but the rest of the games get 40 or 50k. Serie A and La Liga barely feature in the ratings. MLS matches on ESPN get over 300k whereas FS1 and UDN get half that which backs up my point, the more accessible a match is, the more people will watch. The average viewership for the 7 BL games on Fox this season was 327,714. The 5 regular season MLS games on Fox in 2016 averaged 658,000.
Here's a chart of Canadian media markets on http://www.canadatvmedia.com/canadian-television/statistics.html No-one has mentioned Kitchener have they (not that there'll be any expansion in Canada)? Here are the top ten media markets in NA.
Kitchener is too close to Toronto to add much regionally, let alone nationally, I think. So if the expansion is for the local market alone, it's too small.
Definitely a good match for what the CPL wants to build. The area has sufficient population and money, and currently no top level sports to crowd the team out of public perception. I think there's room for over half of the CPL to exist between Quebec City and Windsor; there are a bunch of good sized cities there and it would make it easier to travel, not just for teams, but for fans. One of the things that is understandably uncommon in the large sports leagues of North America is traveling fans. Places are just too far apart most of the time. Of course, the big areas outside that region must be covered to be seen as something like the CFL: Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg. But after that... sure, Halifax, Victoria, and Regina or Saskatoon would be great, since they give access to their regions, but they're not essential.