Bye Bye NHL? MLS to take the #4 Spot in US Sports?

Major League Soccer is Poised to Overtake the NHL as the 4th Most Popular Professional Sports League in the U.S.

As data from the 2010 Census emerges, the cultural demographic of the U.S. population is shifting. It’s only a matter of time until our sports landscape catches up.

For the better part of half a century, U.S. professional sports have been dominated by the four major professional sports leagues: the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. ...

See the full story here, courtesy of Fox News Latino.

Kicking Back Comments: An interesting article but not really an apples to apples comparison. It would appear Ms. Ortiz conclusions are based largely on the 2010 census data. There are some key points she left out.

First while she compared head to head average game attendance with MLS and NHL, she neglects to account for at least two variables. First, each NHL team plays about twice as many games as an MLS team. Second, there are about twice as many NHL teams as MLS teams. If you account for both of these factors, NHL average per game attendance would be 4x MLS average attendance.

That aside, the individual market numbers are interesting and are more apples to apples as are the general trends of increasing attendance for MLS, and decreasing attendance for the NHL.

All and all this is a feel good piece for MLS which continues to expand in its 16th year, and a feel good piece for Latinos who themselves saw growth as a demographic in the 2010 census.

Both are great things for THE game.