This year, 2026, is arguably the biggest year in sports history. The Winter Olympics opened the year in Milano Cortina in February, the Super Bowl LX followed days later in New Orleans, the World Baseball Classic ran through March with Wimbledon and the Tour de France dominating the summer calendar. And we can't forget the centerpiece: the FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by Canada, the US and Mexico from June 11 to July 19 - the first World Cup ever played on Canadian soil.
With that backdrop, we pulled data for 190 Canadian athletes across 15 sports to see which athlete is Canada's favourite.
The 10 Most Searched Canadian Athletes
As expected, ice hockey dominates. Sidney Crosby tops the list at 156,000 monthly searches, despite having no verified Instagram account at all - proof that search interest and social presence are two completely different games.
Six of the top 10 are hockey players. The only non-hockey names to crack it are: Guerrero Jr., Leylah Fernandez and Summer McIntosh.
Seven of the top 10 are hockey players, and they come from six different NHL teams. Sidney Crosby plays for Pittsburgh, Connor McDavid for Edmonton, Auston Matthews for Toronto, Mitch Marner for Vegas and Brad Marchand for Florida.
The only franchise to place two players is the Colorado Avalanche, with Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar both cracking the top 10. Canadians aren't just searching for one team's stars, they're searching for the best player on nearly every roster in the league.
The Most Searched Sport
Add up every athlete's search volume by sport and the gap gets even bigger. Ice hockey generates 846,800 monthly searches across its 20 athletes, more than the next four sports combined.
Hockey dominates so much in Canada, that even during a World Cup year, soccer sits seventh. The gap is almost unfair to compare. Despite Canada co-hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, soccer's entire 18-athlete roster generates search volume worth just 7% of hockey's total.
Tennis comes closer at 175,040, powered by grand slam runs from Fernandez and Andreescu, but that's still barely a fifth of what 20 hockey players pull in on their own.
The Most Followed Canadian Athletes
Flip to Instagram and the leaderboard changes completely. Wrestling personality Natalya leads with 6.1 million followers, ahead of soccer's Alphonso Davies and the NBA's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
Some names break the pattern entirely. Edge (Adam Copeland) ranks 170th out of 175 athletes for search volume but jumps all the way to sixth for follower count - the single biggest mismatch in the whole dataset. Gabriel Diallo sits at the opposite extreme: 12th for search but only 115th for followers, a name Canadians are actively Googling right now that hasn't built the social media presence to match yet.
The Sport That Wins on Followers
Here's the twist. Wrestling's nine tracked athletes pull in 12.9 million combined followers, edging out basketball's 20 athletes at 11.3 million.
The average wrestling personality on this list has 2.5 times more followers than the average basketball player, despite basketball fielding more than double the roster. Hockey, the sport that owns Canadian search behaviour, ranks fourth on followers and dead last on followers per athlete among the top five.
Formula 1 is the most extreme case in the entire dataset. Canada has exactly one active F1 driver, Lance Stroll, and he single handedly generates every one of the sport's 1.7 million followers while pulling just 19,000 monthly searches. It's a one man sport in the truest sense: massive reach, modest curiosity, zero teammates to share the load.
Methodology
Data covers Canadian athletes across 15 sports, drawn only from current national team and active pro league rosters. Search volume is Canada only, pulled via Ahrefs. Instagram followers are from each athlete's verified official account, checked manually to filter out fan pages and impersonator accounts. Where no verified account exists, the athlete is recorded at zero. Figures reflect a single point in time in July 2026 and will shift as rosters and follower counts change.
