The CFL regular season came to a close this past weekend with attendance increasing 3.0 percent across the country.
The largest boost came in Toronto where attendance grew by 20.5 percent year-over-year. The club still has by far the CFL’s lowest average attendance at 14,311, but it’s clear the Boatmen are paddling in the right direction. Winning last year’s Grey Cup likely helped provide the club with a bump, as did a historic win total in 2023 and the emergence of a marketable star quarterback in Chad Kelly.
Toronto has been the CFL’s softest market for a decade but this year’s attendance was the club’s best since 2016. Tickets also seem to be moving well for the East Final, which drew a crowd of 21,331 in 2022. The Argonauts averaged well over 20,000 fans per game as recently as 2013 and if the club maintains its current growth rate, attendance is on pace to return to that level by 2025.
The B.C. Lions also had a surge in attendance as crowds grew by 13.8 percent this season. The club’s average attendance figure of 23,208 was its highest since 2014 and a 30.4 percent increase from 2019, the final season during which David Braley owned the team. The club drew a crowd of 30,114 to the West Semi-Final in 2022, its first home playoff game in six years, and it’ll be interesting to see if they can improve upon that figure when they host the Calgary Stampeders on Saturday.
On the flip side, attendance in Calgary fell 7.5 percent this year to an average of 21,698, the club’s lowest number since 1985. Jay McNeil, the team’s vice president of business operations, revealed before the season that the Stampeders have lost 25 percent of their season ticket base since 2019. Between the team’s decrepit stadium and their worst record in almost 20 years, it’s unsurprising that some fans chose to stay away.
The Ottawa Redblacks also saw a significant decrease in attendance at 6.3 percent as the club missed the playoffs for a fourth straight year. R-Nation has grown frustrated with the team’s poor on-field performance as they’ve posted a 14-54 record since the start of the 2019 season. Head coach Bob Dyce will be back in 2024, though it’s clear that tensions are high in the nation’s capital. The team’s average attendance figure this year was 18,902, its lowest since 2005 when the Ottawa Renegades played their final season before disbanding.
Attendance in Winnipeg grew 6.3 percent to a ten-year high of 30,449, while the Edmonton Elks and Hamilton Tiger-Cats saw growth of 4.1 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively. The Saskatchewan Roughriders saw minimal growth at 0.8 percent after their final home game of the regular season drew the team’s smallest crowd in years. Crowds in Montreal remained virtually unchanged from 2022 as they decreased 0.1 percent.
It should be noted that these numbers are self-reported by teams across the league and can’t be independently verified beyond the information that’s publicly available on Ticketmaster and what is observed by local reporters at stadiums around the league.
Below is a graph depicting how CFL attendance has changed since 2015. The league-wide average attendance figure of 22,393 in 2023 is still down 2.4 percent from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
