With so many mouth-watering dishes being posted on social media at events over the last two years, the sporting experience is truly about much more than what happens on the field, court or rink.
Assessing 18 different stadiums and arenas in Canada, BetVictor wanted to find out which venue could really crown itself as the best when it comes to game day delicacies.
Our research explored a number of metrics, including the number of concessions available at each stadium as well as the number of unique foods you can find at each venue. We also explored the food ratings for each arena, judging them on the number of positive food-related reviews each stadium received from fans. Scroll down to find out more.
Where Does Your Team Rank?
Best Stadiums For Gameday Food
Scotiabank Arena, home of the Toronto Raptors, serves the best gameday food in Canada. They are used to being out on their own, being the sole Canadian representative in the NBA, and slam dunked the competition, scoring a flawless 100 points in the ranking.
Toronto also claimed second place as the Rogers Centre, home of the Blue Jays, knocked our ranking out of the park scoring 92.6 points. The Rogers Arena was the highest-ranked hockey stadium on the list and third overall scoring a total of 69.6 points. The fourth and fifth-place venues both represent the CFL, the TD Place Stadium (62.3 points) and the Tim Hortons Field (57 points) round off the top five.
Worst Stadiums For Gameday Food
The CFL is slowly increasing in popularity across Canada but it appears to have a long way to go when it comes to gameday food as all five of the bottom areas in our ranking are Canadian Football stadiums.
Alberta’s McMahon Stadium is officially the worst stadium for a bite to eat. The 46,040-capacity venue finished bottom of our list due to a lack of positive food reviews from fans.
The Calgary Stampeders’ home has only ever received eight positive food reviews, which doesn’t make the great reading considering that the average positive reviews per stadium in the list is a much higher 105. With that in mind, it may be best advised to eat at home before taking in a live CF event.
Is Canada leading the way when it comes to food variety?
Canada is one of the best places in the world for the variety of concessions readily available at stadiums across the country. There is an average of seven unique types of cuisine available to eat at each arena, including the stereotypical hotdogs and barbecued meats but also Mexican, seafood, fried chicken and of course, the ever-popular poutine dish.
On average, each venue has over 11 food-related concessions with the Scotiabank Saddledome, home of the Calgary Flames, hosting an impressive 17 stands for hockey fans to enjoy. The Scotiabank Arena came in a close second with 16 food stands and it does treat fans to more diverse options sporting 12 unique food stalls.
The Rogers Centre strikes out when it comes to concessions having only six food stands in the whole stadium. This is the lowest figure by far with only the Tim Hortons Field and the Canadian Tire Centre coming close with both venues having eight stalls.
Reviews
Positive reviews are paramount when deciding what gameday food to choose at a sporting event and the Rogers Centre scores a home run with 831 positive four and five-star food-related reviews despite only having six stands. The Bell Centre, home of the Montreal Canadiens, finds itself in second place with 210 reviews and the Rogers Arena (143 reviews) claimed a spot on the podium in third.
The TD Place Stadium, the Tim Hortons Field and the Percival Molson Memorial Stadium set extremely high standards when it comes to their food as every single review they have ever received has included at least some form of positive sentiment in the wording. You can’t go wrong with any of the food at these venues so we would advise trying as much as you can stomach when you catch a game.
Methodology
Using Trip Advisor we gathered 4* and 5* reviews containing the keyword food, we then performed sentiment analysis using the TextBlob library to analyse the text in the body of reviews.
Concession analysis was gathered via the stadium’s official websites and menus available for food concessions only.
Each stadium was given a score based on each of the data variables having equal weighting. We then provided a score for each stadium between 1-100.
