What’s the Most Miserable Sports City in North America?

Surprisingly, it isn’t Cincinnati or Buffalo.

Winnipeg Jets fans clad in all white cheer wildly prior to NHL action between the Jets and the Minnesota Wild in Game Five of the Western Conference First Round during the 2018 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at the Bell MTS Place on April 20, 2018 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. (Photo by Jonathan Kozub/NHLI via Getty Images)
Winnipeg Jets fans clad in all white cheer wildly prior to NHL action between the Jets and the Minnesota Wild in Game Five of the Western Conference First Round during the 2018 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at the Bell MTS Place on April 20, 2018 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. (Photo by Jonathan Kozub/NHLI via Getty Images)
NHLI via Getty Images

Nothing is certain but death, taxes and that the Bengals and Bills will lose in the NFL playoffs in painful fashion.

But, according to the 2018 edition of Canadian analytics site 10 and 3’s “The Most Miserable Sports City,” Cincinnati and Buffalo fans are not the masters of misery any longer.

That honor belongs to Winnipeg, which earned the highest misery score for 2018. Congrats.

(To calculate the score, 10 and 3 looks at the year a team last made the playoffs, last won a playoff series and last won a championship as well as calculates a team’s importance to their city’s fans using Google Search traffic data).

The analysis, which originally only looked at NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL teams, was expanded to include Major League Soccer and Canadian Football League clubs which led to Winnipeg being named the winner. Thankfully for the ‘Peg, it might not be miserable for much longer.

“Crowning Winnipeg as this year’s champion comes with a major caveat: this year’s Winnipeg Jets are actually very good,” 10 and 3 writes. “A deep playoff run (or, lest we jinx things, a Stanley Cup?) could erase years of sports-induced trauma for Winnipeg’s denizens, and cause a tumble down our misery rankings.”

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