Our big summer project has been a set of data expansion projects. While these aren’t live on the production server yet — although they’re coming soon — this blog post provides a little sneak peek at some research into the sports market in the US and Canada. There aren’t any revolutionary findings here: Canadians are way more into hockey and more into rugby and cricket than Americans, but it was still interesting to see the intuition play itself out in the data.

To test the relative interest in the sports, I looked at active, use-based applications or registrations in Class 28 (sporting goods) or 41 (sporting events or training services) in both jurisdictions. The US search criteria was a bit more restrictive, looking only at a keyword in the targeted class. Canada just looked for both the keyword and the class together, although not necessarily the keyword in the class. That difference resulted in the US and Canada having very similar counts, despite the US obviously being the much larger market and trademark registry.

Soccer, baseball, golf, tennis were pretty comparable in both countries. Basketball and football were relatively more popular in the US, and, as noted above, hockey, rugby, and cricket were proportionately more popular north of the border.

Compare those filing numbers with the “favorite” and “participation” numbers in the US for the major sports from Wikipedia.

Sport	Favorite sport[40]	TV viewing record (since 2010)1	Major professional league	Participants (millions)[41]	NCAA DI Teams (Men + Women)	States (HS)2
American football	37%	111.9m	NFL	8.9 m	249 (249M + 0W)	51
Basketball	11%	50.4 m	NBA	30.3 m	698 (351M + 349W)	51
Baseball/Softball	9%	40.0m	MLB	29.3 m	589 (298M + 291W)	49
Soccer	7%	27.3m	MLS	13.6 m	531 (205M + 332W)	51
Ice hockey	4%	27.6m	NHL	3.1 m	95 (59M + 36W)	15

The other thing that stood out is how weird golf is. It has far, far more filings than its relative popularity as a sport would suggest. Presumably part of this is its “gadgety” nature — the sport requires expensive clubs and balls, and lends itself to the use of lots of training accoutrements. To some extent, money can buy (slightly) better results, and the golfing demographic tends to have some cash to spend. In contrast, a sport like basketball really only requires some shoes and a ball, both of those tend to last a while, and a nice new pair of shoes is going to have more aesthetic than functional impact. The continuing (although less dramatic) need for equipment spend probably buoys the tennis and baseball trademark filing numbers a bit, too. Curiously, while football and hockey are pretty equipment-intensive, they don’t see the same spike in trademark filing. These tend to be more “young men’s games,” with participation rates that quickly drop way down compared to viewing interest. As such, while they might be lucrative to present on TV and drive wind on sports radio talk, they don’t generate the same kind of ongoing gear spend that a more lifelong sport does, and that seems to be reflected in the trademark filing trends.