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:
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“In everything from athletic ability to popularity to looks, brains, and clothes, children rank themselves against others. At this age [7 and 8], children can tell you with amazing accuracy who has the coolest clothes, who tells the biggest lies, who is the best reader, who runs the fastest, and who is the most popular boy in the third grade.”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)