As the Canadian Premier League season draws to a close, attention has started to turn once again to the off season where speculation reigns supreme. Much like during pre-CanPL people focused on which teams would be involved in the League’s first season, now fans are wondering if there will be expansion, what teams could potentially be joining, and when. League commissioner Dave Clanachan stoked those fires recently by suggesting in a recent Calgary Sun article that expansion for 2020 was not out of the question.

These are statements that those interested in the league should be somewhat used to. League officials tend to play their cards close to their vests and have dropped an abundance of teasers in the past. Some of those hints and allusions foreshadowed real developments with the league, while others never came to fruition. But while speculation once again spins through rumoured teams in Kitchener-Waterloo, Mississauga, Laval, and Langley, or the ever-present ‘Will the Ottawa Fury make the jump?’ debate, there are some practical reasons why adding an eighth team to the league would be very beneficial.

I doubt that anyone envies the person in charge of building the Canadian Premier League schedule. Due to our northern climate, the season is necessarily short. Some of the stadiums are shared with other teams like in the cases of Forge and Valour. There are other competitions to schedule around including the Voyageurs Cup and Concacaf League and it is always preferable to avoid scheduling games during international breaks. And then once you have worked around all those complications, you may have a television schedule to accommodate.

The final exacerbating layer in the 2019 season was the odd number of teams, seven instead of eight. It might seem like a minor factor but it is not minor at all.

The 2019 Canadian Premier League season took place over 27 weeks. Two of those weeks involve the two legs of the League Finals and one of those weeks was a bye week, so the actual League play required 24 weeks total. Due to the fact that there were only seven teams in the league, the maximum number of games that could be played on a weekend was three. A little simple math shows that the maximum number of weekend games that could have been played would have been three games per week over 24 weeks or 72 total games. As it turned out, the League scheduled 64 weekend games while 34 were scheduled to be played midweek for a total of 98 games for the season. Therefore midweek games comprised just shy of 35% of the season’s total games.

This is a problem for many reasons, but two are immediately apparent. For teams, fixture congestion is a significant difficulty. Playing every weekend and every midweek exhausts players and increases their likelihood of injury. It gives teams fewer days to train. Combined with the Voyageurs Cup, it means teams may need to rotate their squads more than they would prefer (admittedly this may be a bonus to players further down the depth chart). With travel for away games covering large distances and games coming fast and furious, avoiding midweek games would be very helpful for teams.

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly for League officials and team owners, midweek games do not draw as well. During the league’s Fall season the average reported attendance for weekend games was around 4300 fans per game. The midweek average was only around 3350 fans per game. As this young league establishes itself, having conditions set to attract the maximum number of fans is critical, and in this regard avoiding midweek games would be very beneficial.

Adding an eighth team would have a very positive affect on the scheduling situation. If the League wished to keep the same number of games for each team as in 2019, it would increase the total number of games played from 98 to 112. However, by allowing for four games to be played per weekend, over a 24 week season it would be possible to play 96 weekend games necessitating only 16 midweek games. See the quarter season template below.

CanPL Quarter-Season Template

It is important to note that this is not an actual schedule but a template for a possible schedule. In this template a mystery eighth team is included. Every team plays each other once. Reverse the home and away locations, run the template again and you have completed the Spring Season. Repeat for the Fall season in a total of 24 weeks. Although I have included the four midweek games during week six, they could be scheduled any midweek that was open. The 16 necessary midweek games would only represent 14% of the total number of games, a significant reduction from the 35% midweek games of the 2019 season. To accommodate scheduling conflicts, a few games could be moved to midweek and the schedule would be flexible enough to do so. For players, coaches, and teams there would be significantly less fixture congestion, and for the league and its owners more games would be on the weekend when attendances tend to be best.

We are a week away from awarding the first ever Canadian Premier League champion. But soon after this weekend, people’s attention will turn to the possibility of an eighth team getting across the line for the 2020 season. And while there are risks to bringing a team into the league too quickly and before the team is fully prepared, there are also benefits to doing so if that team is the eighth.

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