No, you’d be correct. The CFL is quite popular in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, somewhat less so in British Columbia, and hardly popular at all in Ontario and Quebec. Their teams (Ottawa, Hamilton, Toronto, and Montreal) do attract their fans, of course, but not on the same level as in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Fun story: I was passing through Regina, Saskatchewan once, and stopped for the night. After checking into my motel, I went for dinner at the sports bar across the parking lot. Well, the Roughriders were playing a game that night, and the place was packed with Saskatchewan fans watching the game on TV. The bartender didn’t ask, “What’ll you have?” or “Need a menu?”; no, rather he wondered why I was not wearing green (white and green are the Roughriders’ colours). I looked around, and I was indeed the only person in the place not wearing green.
I remember once reading Regina referred to as “the Green Bay of Canada” (as far as being the smallest city with a CFL team), and that sort of thing lines up with what you’d see in a Green Bay bar during a Packers game.
Wearing traditional regalia, six Native American warriors ride bareback around the track at breathtaking speeds. After each lap, riders leap from one galloping horse to another, defying fear and gravity. Three teammates stand at the edge of the track, holding the other two horses while the “mugger” waits to catch the incoming horse as the rider throws away the reins and dismounts at a full gallop. During the exchange, horses may rear up, flip or getaway and the incoming horse may or may not stop – it often becomes a classic case of organized mayhem, where one minor error can drastically change the outcome of the race.
That’s quite popular locally; mostly among First Nations, but it also has a fandom among others. There are a few Indian Relay Races held at the local horse race track every year.
I’ve seen them, and they are quite exciting. Without any safety equipment, and riding bareback, the riders border on reckless, but it becomes obvious that they and their horses know exactly what they are doing and what is expected of them. But errors do occur. “Organized mayhem” is a good way to describe it.
I had thought that ringette (a women’s sport like ice hockey with a ring-shaped puck) was only popular in Canada, but Wikipedia suggests it’s popular in Finland as well. At any rate, I suspect it’s getting supplanted by women’s hockey nowadays.
Yes snooker would’ve definitely been an answer to the OP about 20 years ago (with occasional rare exceptions of top level players from outside the Anglophone world), but these days half the top players are from China. They have a production line of top quality players and it’s unlikely to stop any time soon. They’re producing world champions these days.
I’ll nominate Rugby League (as opposed to Union). Not as widely played as the latter, in fact I can’t think of more than a handful of Anglophone countries that participate to a high level.
I think I can hit two birds with one stone here. I’m in Canada, once part of the British Empire, and still a member of the Commonwealth.
Cricket is played here, but pretty much only by expat Pakistanis, Indians, and West Indians. I’ve never known a native-born Canadian who plays it, unless they are the child of the immigrant groups mentioned above. Even then, they might be more attracted by ice or road/ball hockey, baseball, or basketball.
I never heard of netball until I visited Australia when I was 35. My young cousin-in-law played it there. I’ve since learned that the game has a very small following in Canada, but it is nowhere near the point where it is played at schools, where kids might learn it, and go further with it.
I guess the thing is that Canada is sort of an odd duck when it comes to sports. “Countries that were in the British Empire” include Canada, but Canadian sports definitely do not reflect Canada’s British heritage. Ice hockey, and its derivatives, are ours of course, but Canadians prefer it, gridiron football, baseball, basketball, curling, and (sure, why not?) soccer over cricket and netball.
Any sport which holds a legitimate World Cup, in Leagues case with the 10 “top” nations in the world, is IMHO disqualified from the OPs “Sporting events practiced only (or almost only) by one nation”.
The sport is a spectator sport played by professionals as well as amatuers.
The pro/am sport is popular in anywhere from one to a minority of the world’s ~190 countries.
The sport is rare to just about unheard of in the remaining countries.
Surely cricket qualifies on #1 & #2.
My small dubiousness was how true #3 is. Outside that is of my small exerience in the USA where it’s a club sport for expats from cricket-mad countries and, before the advent of worldwide streaming video, something you could find on only the most obscure probably bootleg cable TV channels.
So my question wasn’t whether cricket was big enough. It was whether cricket was small enough in parts of the world I don’t know about.
And yes, baseball qualifies under the same rules. I brought up cricket because by that point in the thread, 12 posts in, nobody else had. Most parochial US sports (but not baseball) had already been mentioned.
I recall our former and greatly missed poster @Northern_Piper was a rabid CFL & Roughriders fan. And yes, he was from Regina. Or at least lived there as an adult; I don’t know where he grew up or went to school.
Curling is popular in some upper Midwest states Minnesota and Wisconsin for sure.
Speaking of Wisconsin – Eau Claire holds the US Kubb championship, which is mostly Scandinavian sport.
Being behind MLB and NFL is not too surprising … but behind curling is.
I know CFL player salaries aren’t at all comparable to NFL salaries, but still: Is the CFL a financially healthy league in 2026? It’s got a long history and plenty of its own lore and, surely, some degree of cultural penetration. Was the CFL a bigger deal in the past, and just got superseded by other sports & entertainment options?
The infrastructure investment would be considerable, but as a thought experiment:
Could curling be played on a non-ice surface? A sufficiently waxed hard-material floor, or maybe something akin to a larger shuffleboard, um, board? It wouldn’t quite play the same as the on-ice version, but it might be a way to spread the sport to warm-weather areas (in the US and elsewhere).
There’s no way this hasn’t been tried, even if only casually. I’m sure Canadian teenagers somewhere have snuck into their school gymnasium with second-hand curling stones just to see. Or maybe some other kinds of heavy sliding/rolling objects besides actual stones?
I dont think amyone has mentioned lacrosse yet, so I’ll toss it out there using a long stick with a basket on the end.
Lacrosse is modestly popular in the United States. There are organized youth leagues and university teams. There is even a professional league, although the players probably have to take second jobs to make ends meet.
I think it is also played in Canada?
But outside of North America, I doubt anyone has heard of it.
Now see. Around here, in recent years, some bowling alleys have added indoor cornhole-playing areas**. And they’re popular – they’ve got local leagues and all that. My employer even competes in a local charity cornhole event every year, held in conjunction with a larger and more-established golf charity event. And these kinds of cornhole events are easy to find around here.
Anyway … no reason this kind of thing couldn’t happen with indoor floor curling. The space requirements look roughly equivalent to cornhole, and far less than pickleball. I presume the smaller floor curling stones are much less of a financial investment than qualiy ice curling stones. Why can’t floor curling be the cool new pastime of the 2030s?
** Speaking of, is organized competitive cornhole principally a US or North American thing? I do see at the link above that an international World Cup started in 2023.
Scotland has their icon Highland Games, featuring athletic events involving throwing large, heavy objects. The most unusual is The Caber Toss. The others are similar to conventional Track & Field events: Scottish Hammer Throw, Stone Put, Weight Throw, and Weight for Height.