I was recently asked a simple but important question:
If Montreal had an MLB team playing 81 home games, how many tourists would actually come per game—from visiting cities and nearby regions?
Not a headline number. A real, grounded estimate.
Here’s how I think about it.
Start With First Principles
Let’s anchor a few realities:
- MLB averages roughly 30,000 fans per game
- Montreal already welcomed ~12 million visitors annually
- Sports travel is real: over 100 million people travel 50+ miles for events each year
So instead of guessing, the right approach is to break it into two buckets:
👉 Visiting team fans
👉 Regional / drive-market visitors
1. Visiting Team Cities
Think:
- New York
- Boston
- Toronto
- Chicago
- Los Angeles
These fans travel—but selectively.
Weekends, rivalries, marquee matchups.
Estimate:
👉 500 to 900 tourists per game
👉 Base case: ~700
That’s about 2%–3% of attendance
Over a season:
👉 ~40,000 to 70,000 visitors
2. Adjacent Provinces & States (The Real Driver)
This is where it gets interesting.
Think:
- Ontario (Toronto, Ottawa)
- Quebec City / regional Quebec
- Upstate New York
- Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine
- Parts of the Northeast U.S.
These are:
- drive markets
- weekend trips
- low friction decisions
And importantly—this is already where Montreal tourism focuses.
Estimate:
👉 1,100 to 2,000 tourists per game
👉 Base case: ~1,500
That’s roughly 4%–7% of attendance
Over a season:
👉 ~90,000 to 160,000 visitors
The Combined Picture
Put it together:
- Visiting cities: ~700
- Regional markets: ~1,500
👉 Total: ~2,200 tourists per game
Across 81 games:
👉 ~175,000 to 180,000 tourist visits annually
Why This Matters
The key insight isn’t the number.
It’s the composition.
Most people assume:
👉 “Tourism comes from the visiting team’s city”
That’s wrong.
The real volume comes from:
👉 nearby, accessible, repeatable travel markets
In other words:
Montreal wouldn’t just sell baseball.
👉 It would sell weekends
👉 It would sell experiences
👉 It would sell proximity-driven tourism
The Strategic Lens
This is where most people overcomplicate things.
You don’t need:
- global awareness campaigns
- unrealistic international projections
You need:
👉 consistent conversion from nearby markets
Because those are:
- cheaper to acquire
- easier to activate
- more likely to repeat
The WatchMojo Effect (A realistical amplifier)
Where WatchMojo comes into play is not in “creating demand from scratch,” but in reinforcing and accelerating decisions that are already close to being made.
At scale—tens of millions of monthly viewers globally—the impact is less about awareness and more about conversion at the margin:
👉 turning “we should visit Montreal this summer” into
👉 “let’s go this weekend—and catch a game”
Practically, that shows up most in:
- adjacent markets (Ontario, Northeast U.S.)
- short-notice trips
- repeat visits
A realistic planning assumption isn’t a step-change—it’s a lift:
👉 +5% to +15% on the regional bucket
👉 +3% to +8% on visiting-team fans
Which translates into:
👉 ~2,300 to 2,500 tourists per game
👉 +10,000 to 25,000 additional visitors per season
Not transformational on its own—but highly additive, scalable, and compounding over time.
Final Thought
In a base case:
👉 ~2,200 tourists per game
👉 ~180,000 per season
Conservative:
👉 ~1,600 per game
Aggressive:
👉 ~2,900 per game
Bottom Line
The success of an MLB team in Montreal won’t hinge on distant, one-off visitors.
It will hinge on something far simpler:
👉 Ontario
👉 the Northeast U.S.
👉 and people deciding, on a Tuesday, to spend a weekend in Montreal
That’s the real opportunity.