Yes, there are a handful of North American cities that have multiple teams in sports leagues. I think those are referred to as the “exceptions that prove the rule”. But sure, we could use those as evidence that CPL could put multiple teams in the GTA......it should be obvious which option I would suggest makes sense.
This league needs to announce some actual news or the Canadian Civil War is going to break out on here.
I would say by most casual Canadian soccer fans. Remember that most of the people in the stands at CPL games are going to be people who don't currently go out to watch club soccer. What little most of them will be familiar with will be MLS (or Europe on TV). So, yes, most of them will view the CPL as lower league. At the start is all that matters because that's all people are going to see when them come out to give this new league a try. "We're going to be great in ten years!" isn't going to bring someone back for a second look if the level is poor today. I agree that titles don't matter but neither does the mandate. What will matter is whether what the league puts on the field is good enough to bring casual fans back for a second game and convert them into real fans of the league.
Those are enough examples to demonstrate that it is not "un-North American" to have multiple teams in a single urban area, I don't see how "exceptions that prove the rule" applies here. And to be clear, I'm not saying that GTA can support multiple CPL teams, I'm only saying that the presence of TFC does not necessarily prevent CPL from having a team in this area as well.
Those are really two cities (NY and LA) with single league examples from Chicago and Mexico. I'd say they are exceptions. I don't think it's a question of population so much as the willingness of that population to support an additional team that's not at the same level as the existing team.
Where did I say that? I said that in NA the main city in the CMA has the teams and the suburbs identify with them. that applies to the teams you have identified. How many cities in Canada and USA? How many have professional sports teams spread across MLS/NHL/NBA/MLB/NFL? How many of them have multiple teams in the same league? They are the exceptions....no? The significant difference between those cities/teams you listed and CPL entering the GTA is that the multiple team cities above all have their teams in the same league.....CPL would be dntering the GTA as a “lower level” team compared to the existing soccer club in the market.....and that matters (IMO).
There was also San Francisco. Again, his point was that multiple teams in a single urban area is not done in North America. My point is that it is done. No examples in Canada yet of course, but there's nothing to say that it can't be. In fact, Canadians should be more open to the idea than Americans are. The US is an anomaly in the world in that it has a large number of sizeable urban centres, so the one team per metro makes more sense there. Canada, like most countries, has only a very few. Australia, though not in North America but still a country much like Canada in very many ways, has recognised this in A-League and have two teams in each of Sydney and Melbourne. Both are about the same size as Toronto. If those cities can support two A-League teams then I see no reason why Toronto can't support one MLS and one CPL. To say "that's the way we've always done it, we cannot change" is folly in my opinion. Compare Canada to the way we were 40 years ago, we've accepted many changes. I don't think that this one is as much of a stretch as many other changes Canada has adjusted to. In fact, not so long ago, just following soccer was "un-North American".
By “his point” I think you mean me....,read what I said....it had nothing to do with the number of teams (although multiples are an exception) it was about their location and name.....to assist, here is the quote:
I just love when MLS and Europe are put on an equal footing. Any casual watching Euro soccer don't think much of MLS either in this country outside the 3 cities. Also, who cares in the end? We get our own league, a Division 1 that will develop more Canadian players, that's what matters, not that constant need to "brand the league as inferior" which isn't the point at all. CPL won't be in MLS cities but in places where there's no MLS. As for the level of play, I trust the league will find the right balance between level of play, development and Canadian content. Again, marketing, Canadian content, good infrastructure, strong ownership, presentation...none of that matters, right? I think it will get casuals hooked for a number of reasons that you and I disagree. I'm not talking the 3 MLS cities, but elsewhere? CPL will succeed. The 3 MLS cities will the true test for CPL once they decide to go in. The mandate absolutely matters. The CSA understands that the league's success and the National Team success are intertwined. A stronger National Team will get more Canadians to invest and watch soccer, which in turns is good for CPL. Having a strong National team with players from CPL will get the league even more over. And before you say that MLS academies are more likely to produce more NT players, I'm gonna stop you right there and invite you to look at our strongest roster. The ONLY difference maker on the NT that was develop by an MLS academy as of today is Anthony Jackson-Hamel and he's not a starter. The other difference makers were either born elsewhere (Arfield, Borjan) , developed oversea (Cavallini, Piette, Hoillett) or funny enough came from Non-MLS Canadian Academies (Larin, Davies, James, Ricketts, Hutchinson). Our strongest prospect in Liam Millar was from a MIssissauga academy and he moved to England and now killing it at Liverpool U team. Where was TFC? So the mandate matters because you can expect CPL teams to affiliate with existing academies while developing more over time. A stronger NT with more players coming from CPL will get more people to watch it.
You forget the bigger context of having so many metro areas in the US that it makes sense for league to have the biggest coverage as possible, especially for TV markets. If the US was like your typical Euro or south American country, you'd have tons of teams in the biggest metro areas. I always thought that Red Bulls vs NYFC was dumb. It should have been Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens etc... Same for LA and Chicago. Those derbies would have been insane. But I understand that there are so many huge metro areas in the US that they can only put so many teams in one metro. You can't apply US logic to Canada. We're more similar to Europe and Australia in regards of where people live. To his credit, that's the approch Paul Beirne is taking with CPL. You've been proven wrong but that's your opinion and that ok. It's already the case around the world. Look at the English Championship with their London clubs, or Ligue 2 with their Paris club and so on and so on. This idea that somehow Canadians will have a mental blockage because teams in the same areas are in different leagues/tier is a huge assumption. Canadians are well aware of how it works outside the United States. Even Laval just proved that it could draw big attendance for an AHL team while the Habs are on the other island Laval Rocket http://www.hockeydb.com/nhl-attendance/att_graph.php?tmi=12222
According to the Voyageurs Forum administrator: "They have been on a non stop coast to coast rampage of focus groups. "
I suspect the primary reason that most of the examples you provided have multiple clubs in the city is because of their population.. NYC has over 8 million living in the city proper and 20 million living in the metropolitan area..Mexico City has 9 million in the city proper and 20 million in the metro area.. LA has almost 4 million living in the city proper and 13 million living in the metropolitan area. The only real exception to that is San Francisco/Oakland, which, combined, have a little over a million in the cities proper and over 4 million in the metro area.. It may also be worth noting that both the Oakland teams (Raiders and A's) are near the bottom of their sports in revenue and have been trying for some time to get out of Oakland.. At 3 million in the city proper and 6 million in the metro area, Toronto falls more on the San Francisco/Oakland side of the scale than the LA/NYC/Mexico City side of the scale. Add to that the fact that soccer is still a fairly niche sport and that TFC is sucking up support for and you could see how such a claim could be made...
Understood but there's a key difference here, and that is the leagues in which SF and Chicago have multiple teams in are very high budget leagues, where many individual players have salaries in the millions and require far more fan support than what an MLS / CPL combination would require. If it can be done on such a large scale in SF / Chicago, then there's every reason to believe that it can be done on a small scale. I think that, in Toronto at least, soccer has moved well past being a niche sport. TFC draws nearly 30k a game (with high ticket prices, which implies a pretty solid demand), it's the most played sport by kids, and the World Cup fever hits pretty hard here.
It's not a key difference tho. The scale of their salaries is on par to the teams' revenue and a majority of their revenue is brought in via media contracts and sponsorships. These are things that aren't necessarily going to be available to CPL teams, which means it isn't scalable. Toronto FC may have moved beyond a niche team in Toronto.. However, that doesn't mean that other teams in Toronto will also be successful.. They also aren't going to be competing with just TFC, they are also competing with the EPL, Champions League, Real Madrid/Barcelona/Bayern, etc.
There was one in Toronto yesterday.....not sure it was full (seems some folks had reserved spots and cancelled).
I'm not sure that's a valid comparison. Those are teams people would watch on TV rather than actually going to see live. Also, due to the time time zone difference between here and Europe, those games are typically on in the morning, whereas CPL matches are on in the afternoon.
In the months that overlap, though, there is the “there is only so many hours in the day “ factor to consider. I like to watch me a couple to 3 EPL matches on a Saturday......but if, say, there is a 3 o’clock Impact v TFC match I will skip some/all of the EPL to get done things done before that match comes on. There is also network time competition.....somewhere they will face the question “just how much air time do we give to the various soccer leagues/properties”.....this might be where CanCon might help CPL a bit in the decision process.
Unfortunately, it is. Thanks to the invention of HD TV, watching sports on TV at home is, in many ways, a better experience than going to a game live. There are certainly advantages to the live experience (particularly soccer where you have crowd involvement), but for the casual fan, being able to see a game from the comfort of your home where the food/beer is "free" and you don't have to worry about the elements. There is also the factor of how big the drop off in quality is going to be. It's a factor for MLS and it will be doubly so for the CPL.
Those who went last night saw the logo of the Canadian Premier League logo next to the other leagues logo
Except you're missing one key factor. Football is life in England. Not so much in Canada. Everyone know's Canada is a hockey country and that Toronto is THE hockey city of the world. And as another poster pointed out, look at the miserable failure that the two OHL teams were / are in the GTA. They couldn't be sustained because they were minor league.
Amazing. Comparing OHL to NHL. Because we both know that another Toronto NHL team would fail...right? If there was a Markham expansion, it would fail too... because OHL teams in the regiin failed...or is it that there are limits how much a junior team can draw? There was junior hockey in Verdun, Montreal and it failed, yet Laval has a AHL team and it's thriving. I don't think they are good examples on the viability of the league