Popularity
As in other English-speaking nations outside the United Kingdom, association football has been traditionally overshadowed by a rival code of the game with explicitly local roots. As in Australia, where Australian Rules Football took hold; and Ireland, where Gaelic Football is played; while in New Zealand rugby holds greater popularity; Canadian football usurped Association Football. In 1869, the founding of Hamilton Football Club, who played what would become Canadian football, helped make that sport the dominant football code in Canada by the dawn of the twentieth century.
Despite the difference in popularity of their respective professional leagues, association football overtook ice hockey in the 1980s and 1990s as the sport with the most registered players in the country. In 2008, there were 873,032 footballers, compared to 584,679 registered hockey players in Canada in 2008-09.
Read more about this topic: Soccer In Canada
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)