Timing for hosting Grey Cup in Toronto is all wrong
Fans haven’t warmed to new home field, and CFL’s big game is taking a hit
It sounded like a good idea at the time.
Awarding the 104th Grey Cup to Toronto at the end of what would surely be a season of rebirth for the Argonauts, free at last from imprisonment at the cavernous Rogers Centre, certain to be experiencing a boffo response from their long-suffering fans ….
What a climax to the season it would be for the Canadian Football League’s signature event. Maybe not as lucrative as if the game were staged in a larger stadium, but at 35,000 seats including temporary bleachers, a Grey Cup game staged in BMO Field’s atmosphere alone would provide the kind of emotional charge — in the league’s biggest market — that money couldn’t buy.
And who knows (went the thinking): with Ricky Ray back and healthy, the Argos might even be in their own championship game, just like the 100th Grey Cup.
Does the CFL get points for good intentions? Because all that made a kind of sense, once.
Then BMO Field opened in its new football-friendly configuration and after one lavishly hyped and desperately marketed game, it became quite apparent that the problem in Toronto wasn’t what we thought ... or shall we say “hoped”? It wasn’t the stadium. And just in case there were still a large market of CFL fans debating whether they should leave their TV sets and actually go to the games, the Argos proceeded to stink like limburger cheese.
And Ray got hurt, and meanwhile the club had already let Ray’s presumptive successor Trevor Harris go to Ottawa as a free agent, and their season went south faster than a planeload of snowbirds.
Which is how we got to Tuesday’s announcement that the Argos have reduced Grey Cup ticket prices in a number of sections to as little as $89 for the Bob Uecker seats, less than $150 for some others.
Ostensibly, this was to reflect a certain amount of “event fatigue” in a Toronto market that has been saturated with the NBA all-star game, the Raptors’ playoff run, the World Cup of Hockey, the Blue Jays’ runaway bandwagon and which, come the Christmas season, will play host to half of the IIHF World Junior Hockey Championship and the NHL’s 100th anniversary Winter Classic.
There’s probably some truth in that. Even a city as big and wealthy as Toronto has to turn off the money faucet at some point, and without a compelling reason for on-the-fence fans to spend the kind of money the Argos were asking, the Grey Cup was always vulnerable.
The league, which sells each year’s Grey Cup rights to the host team, no doubt had a hand in encouraging the price reduction because its marquee game with whole swaths of empty seats wasn’t going to look good on the CFL at a time in its frequently embattled history when even a new or newish stadium isn’t guaranteed to stem the erosion of the fan base.
Only 16,000 or so fans attended Toronto’s home games at BMO on average in 2016.
To his credit, Argos president Michael Copeland didn’t hide behind a lot of bafflegab in announcing the price cuts.
The customer isn’t always right, but if he (or she) isn’t biting ...
“Ultimately, we want the stadium to be full,” Copeland said. “We want people to understand how great it is to see a football game at BMO Field, especially one of the scale and excitement of the Grey Cup.
“It’s a business and when you run these events you do so to try and generate revenue. But if those best-laid and wellintentioned plans aren’t serving the people you’re trying to serve, then it’s up to you to do the right thing.”
Grey Cup revenue has saved many a football club from a money-losing season. With the price cuts, this one is not going to save Bell and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment chair Larry Tanenbaum from taking a small (in their overall scheme of things) bath on the 2016 campaign.
The idea being kicked around the Rest of Canada, though, that this proves Toronto is a lousy sports town, ignores a lot of evidence to the contrary — like 50 years of mostly crummy hockey faithfully supported, or the Raptors’ rapidly broadening appeal, or the Blue Jays selling 3.4 million tickets in 2016, or Toronto FC drawing 26,668 fans per game, fourth in Major League Soccer.
Nope. This comes down to large metropolitan markets with eyes cast south, not exactly a new thought, but one that has to be occurring to the CFL brain trust.
A gate-driven league that is having difficulty at the gate in its three largest cities has to work extra hard, with a lot less room for error, to make football fans appreciate the product that’s right there in front of them.
Putting the CFL’s big show Toronto is necessary from time to time, but never without risk. It has to catch Hogtown in just right mood. The Argos haven’t given the fans much to appreciate, and the Grey Cup — only about half sold out with the regular season nearly over — is paying the price.