Wittmann45
Full Member
Are the Leafs the biggest/most supported club in Canada?
Who would they be on the equivalent to an English football club?
Leafs followed pretty closely by Montreal, in terms of fan support and overall value. The Leafs are probably the most supported and most hated team in Canada.
Sportnet (along with CBC, who Sportsnet have some sort of agreement over shared rights) and TSN, the two big sports channels here, build a lot of their NHL coverage around the Leafs. It is so bad that I think a lot of fans of teams in the West, ie Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, tend to complain about how much coverage the Leafs get. RDS, the big French station, is dominated by Montreal. A lot of sports commentators in Canada, guys like Jeff O'Neill, gain a lot of traction by shitting on the Leafs one day for being inept then celebrating every one of their players the next day as the best player in the league at their position.
As for an English equivalent, maybe an even worse version of Liverpool before Klopp, in that it is a team with lots of history but little success in the last number of decades. Leafs fans and Liverpool fans pre-Klopp were also pretty similar in that they tend to be pretty arrogant and overrate a lot of their players. Next year is always theirs until they are knocked out of the playoffs in the first round.