By now, many of you sports fans know that the Saskatchewan Roughriders are not going to have a season. Last Monday, the Canadian Football League voted to cancel their entire 2020 schedule after the federal government turn down their last ditch request for a loan to stage a shortened season.
Personally, I am stunned by this turn of events. As a die-hard CFL fan, I have struggled to get my thoughts together about this wipeout of football in Canada in the face of COVID-19.
This shutdown of CFL football really is the culmination of poor decisions and missed opportunities by the league over several decades. This league really has been flying by the seat of its pants for too long. You always got the sense that the CFL was a league that was always barely hanging on, even when things were going well.
Now, it’s come back to bite them this year with the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. While other sports leagues — pretty much all the other major leagues — had to suspend operations for months and then dip into their reserves to finish their seasons, the CFL seemed gripped in paralysis.
This league took forever to come up with their “hub city” plans (Winnipeg) and even then, it all depended on the league receiving financial help from the federal government.
A lot of local people have taken the opportunity to blame their obvious favorite target, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for turning down the league’s final pleas for financial help. While there are lots of reasons to dislike Trudeau, I would suggest this one is probably well down in the list of grievances.
The reality is the CFL has done it to themselves. I remember tuning in the Heritage Committee meeting earlier this year in which commissioner Randy Ambrosie outlined the awful financial state of the League and begged the Feds for upwards of $150 million. It was a dismal display in which Ambrosie didn’t seem to be on the same page with any of the MPs. Saskatoon MP Kevin Waugh particularly roasted the commissioner, I recall.
Then I watched as the CFL’s request kept on being revised downward in the weeks afterward, to $42 million, and then finally to a $30 million interest-free loan request. It was like a Telemiracle telethon in reverse: instead of going higher and higher, the CFL kept on going lower and lower.
While the league was spinning its wheels, other Canadian pro sports were getting back up and running, with Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the NBA and NHL all back in business. None of them went before a Commons committee begging for cash. In the NHL’s case they went to government officials, not for a bailout, but to negotiate to set up their COVID-19-free “bubbles” in hub cities.
The NHL set up its playoffs in Toronto and Edmonton for 24 of its teams, and so far it has been a big success with no players testing positive for COVID-19. They’ve been playing, at exactly the same time that the CFL usually holds its season.
When I went on my “staycation” — which consisted of a trip to eastern Saskatchewan instead of my usual summer trip to British Columbia — I tuned in to endless NHL hockey games on the satellite radio. This was absolutely bizarre: it’s August, temperatures are close to 30 degrees, and the NHL was on.
Hockey is great, but it wasn’t October yet. I wanted to hear my beloved CFL games on the radio.
The CFL should be playing right now. No excuses. Yes, COVID-19 threw North American society for a loop, but major sports leagues found a way to adapt, even without fans in attendance. Major League Baseball played in stadiums with cardboard cutout fans. The NBA and MLS staged games in Orlando. The UFC went so far as to stage fights on a remote desert island! (Mind you, the island was in Abu Dhabi, but you get the idea.)
All we’ve gotten from the CFL is excuses. The big excuse for why they couldn’t put a season together was because they are a gate-driven League, so they don’t have the financial resources like the other leagues do.
You want to know why they are so gate-driven? It’s because they have dropped the ball in figuring out how to make money elsewhere, through TV or merchandise sales.
For decades, the common complaint is that the CFL don’t do enough marketing of its teams or their star players. You see plenty of NFL jerseys for sale at the various sports merchandise stores, but do you ever see CFL jerseys for sale around the league for stars like Mike Reilly or Bo Levi Mitchell? Maybe in Saskatchewan you still do, for players like Cody Fajardo, but it hardly happens elsewhere.
Another excuse is that this league doesn’t get enough television revenue. I don’t buy that. You would think the CFL could get a TV deal done with TSN that is half decent, given that the Grey Cup is still the most watched sporting event in the country and that TSN is desperate for programming after losing NHL national rights.
Meanwhile, other sports leagues are able to extract millions upon millions of dollars from TV. The NHL’s deal with Rogers Sportsnet was for a reported $5.2 billion! These networks have been practically giving money away — reminds you of what our Prime Minister has been doing.
The CFL could have also done a better job over the years selling their product to the international markets like the United States, Mexico, Europe or wherever else. The NFL and NBA are heavily into the international markets, so why not the CFL? Of course, we now have the CFL 2.0 international initiative by Ambrosie, where he is globetrotting around the world making partnerships with international football organizations. But for years, you couldn’t even get CFL games shown on television in international markets that care about football, like the USA.
Lately, they’ve made some inroads with a deal with ESPN, but it seems like the CFL has always been one step behind. When you are a football league up against a behemoth like the NFL, this is never going to work. The game plan for every football league that has been up against the NFL, ever since the American Football League in the Sixties, has been to innovate — to come up with rules to make the game better, new in-game production values for a more dynamic TV presentation, and so on.
The CFL’s one big recent innovation was coach’s challenges to reverse calls on the field, but that was a big fiasco because it slowed down the game. The CFL needs to innovate, but only if it improves the flow and presentation of the game.
As for their strategy of being a “gate-driven” sport? That hasn’t gone so well, either.
Just tune in TSN and see the empty seats at BMO Field during an Argos game — or for that matter, at stadiums all over the league. Last year, I went with my family to see the Riders at BC Place against the Lions and I was shocked to find they had cordoned off the stadium’s entire upper deck. In the old days, that deck was filled with fans.
Demographically, this league is in trouble. Any time I go to a CFL game it seems like the audience includes a large number of older patrons. Even at Riders games the audiences are full of grey-haired people. (Full disclosure: I have grey hair.)
Yeah, young people do show up, but I’ve noticed a sharp difference in the crowds at other sports — in the UFC the crowd is much younger and more diverse. For the Raptors, their crowds are younger and even more diverse - they’ve tapped into the Asian and South Asian fan base in a big way.
Somewhere along the line, the CFL failed to find the new Canadians. They also failed to hand down the game from one generation to the next. Instead, that next generation ended up becoming Blue Jays fans or Raptors fans or UFC fans or MLS fans, or whichever new team or sport came along in this country to provide new competition to the CFL.
Lately, the CFL has started to appeal to new audiences with their “concert series” and “Diversity is Strength” initiatives. Again, they needed to do this years ago. The CFL needs to be relentless in attracting the fans of the future — young people, and people new to the country.
But they fumbled the ball away during this pandemic. Shutting down an entire sport for a year does not fit the definition of “being relentless in attracting the fans of the future.” It’s not that the league doesn’t care about the fans by its decision to shut down; they don’t seem to care whether they even have fans.
Now, the league is out of sight, and out of mind. I compare the situation to a bunch of restaurants that had to close during the pandemic, only to reopen and adapt to the new COVID-19 world — with one exception.
What happens? The returning customers end up going to the other restaurants — and the chances are they might never return to the one that remained closed.
What really bothers me is that this shutdown could have been avoided if the league had done a better job selling tickets, selling merchandise and marketing their sport long before the pandemic hit. They could have been in a decent financial position to trudge through and stage a season. Not only did they fail to do that, they wasted the money that had come in on big six-figure contracts for players like Reilly and Mitchell. This league has no one to blame but themselves.
The CFL is in trouble, folks. I just hope they can figure out a way to turn things around next year, assuming they’re back.
