CFL OVERCOMES OBSTACLES
But along with positive data, there are troubling numbers now and potentially in future
The 2017 Canadian Football League season began last week with what was a typically CFL affair. It was a nice early-summer night at McGill University stadium, a wonderful location that played no small role in reviving the league in Montreal and providing a blueprint for how to do it in other markets.
The game between the Alouettes and Roughriders was close fought, if a little sloppy, featuring two veteran quarterbacks who, as is the trend, played the previous season for the team on the other side of the field. It wasn’t decided until the last play of the game. Oh, and there was a baffling call on a fumble-touchdown, upheld on replay review, that no one could particularly understand. All very CFL.
But the game also provided evidence of some of the challenges facing a league that has roots dating to about 20 years after Canada was born. The league grew steadily in the postwar years until the late 1980s. Then, following a disastrous and failed expansion into the United States in the early 1990s, the CFL bounced back thanks in large part to a national broadcast deal with TSN.
But Montreal’s season-opener, which was more than 3,000 fans short of a sellout, was emblematic of troubling recent trends. While attendance has been excellent in Hamilton’s new stadium, in back-from-the-dead Ottawa and in always-reliable Saskatchewan, the country’s largest markets — Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver — have all seen sharp declines of one sort or another in recent seasons. Even in Calgary, where the Stampeders were historically good in 2016, attendance lagged behind 2015.
Add in the surprise departure of commissioner Jeffrey Orridge this spring, who was only two years into the job and whose split was only ever explained as being over “philosophical differences” with the league’s board, and it’s fair to ask of the one pro sports league that is unabashedly Canadian: should the CFL be worried? Or are these just headwinds that the venerable league is figuring out how to overcome?
First, a couple statements before the discussion. One, the situation in Toronto is so different than anywhere else in the CFL that it merits a separate examination. The Argonauts were thought to be on a short path to an Alouettes-like rebirth with their move to BMO Field last season, but instead attendance was alarmingly poor, the team stunk, and the whole football operations staff was eventually blown up. But we will leave that for later.
And two, the CFL is in no kind of crisis. The league still has five seasons, including this one, left on a $40-million-per-year broadcast deal with TSN that almost on its own allows clubs to cover their biggest cost, player salaries. There are dozens of baseball, hockey and basketball teams in the big North American leagues who would love that kind of financial security.
But consider the scene in a Toronto hotel conference room late last year, as Orridge had a state-of-the-league town hall with diehard fans, the kind wearing vintage CFL jerseys and hard hats with sirens on them and homemade coveralls that said, “Our Balls are Bigger.”
They had questions: what was the league doing about attendance declines? What about attracting younger fans? And, the question no one asked: what happens, as the broadcast industry loses cable subscribers, if TSN eventually wants a cheaper deal? What happens, in other words, if the league’s biggest tentpole is chopped down?
Jim Lawson, the chairman of the CFL’s board and the interim commissioner until a replacement is hired, says “the game is in a very good place today.”
He says the new stadiums in Ottawa, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Toronto and, this summer, Regina, have “the wind blowing in the right direction.”
But he also acknowledges the challenges.
“There’s definitely a sense that we have an aging demographic,” he says, but suggests that’s not solely because younger Canadians aren’t into the CFL.
“It’s more the way that demographic is now consuming sports. There’s a whole new generation of people that is watching sports on their phones,” he says. “I think it’s a concern, but I think the bigger concern is with sports generally.”
There is evidence to back up that theory. A study of U.S. television data published by SportsBusiness Journal this month found the median age of viewers increased for all major leagues over the past decade, from 40 years old for MLS to 64(!) for the PGA Tour.
The CFL certainly has not avoided that trend. Its overall viewership dropped sharply on TSN from 2014 to 2015, but a new advertising campaign and major investment in digital and social media helped turn the 19 per cent drop a year earlier into a 3.5 per cent gain last season. But for TSN’s average weighted audience of 553,000 viewers per game in 2016, about 170,000 of them came in the 18-49 demographic. Put another way, about 70 per cent of the viewing audience was not in the age group with which advertisers are most concerned.
And while the CFL isn’t alone in trying to figure out how to attract more millennials to its business, some of their competitors are ahead in the race. According to Rogers Sportsnet, the average 18-49 audience for its Toronto Blue Jays broadcasts in 2016 was 327,600 viewers, or almost double that of a typical CFL game.
That was itself a double-digit (11 per cent) increase from 2015, when 295,000 members of the 18-49 cohort watched an average Jays game on television. The Jays alone are proof that younger viewers don’t have to be written off as unreachable.
Meanwhile, data provided by Major League Soccer says it has the youngest fans of any U.S.based league, at 34.9 years old, lower than the NBA (38.5) and NHL (42.1). That has translated into success at the gate.
Where attendance has declined modestly for three straight years in the CFL, MLS has set attendance records in three straight seasons. And in 2016, the three biggest percentage gains in MLS attendance came at its three Canadian clubs: Montreal was up 16 per cent, Toronto up 13 per cent and Vancouver about nine per cent.
For the Impact and Whitecaps, those meant full seasons at better than 100 per cent capacity. Toronto FC, which added a major stadium expansion in 2016, played to about 89 per cent capacity, although the average attendance of about 23,500 per game dwarfed that of the Argonauts, their new roommates.
Lawson, the CFL chairman, says getting to a younger audience has to be part of their focus.
“We have to be conscious of what (the fan base) looks like 10 to 15 years down the road,” he says.
For Christina Litz, the league’s vice-president of marketing, that work began more than two years ago. She says the league conducted research that found a third of Canadians identified themselves as CFL fans, but there was a large swath of casual fans who didn’t pay much attention until the playoffs.
“They were a little younger and they skewed a little more female,” Litz says.
“So we had to look at what we were doing to make sure we were speaking to that audience on the platforms they spend time with, giving them content they want to see that is also telling them what is happening in the CFL day to day.”
This led to the major investment in digital that saw 100 per cent growth on CFL.ca last year, and a jump of about eight per cent in the 18-49 audience on TSN in 2016. (The CFL’s large relative digital growth still leaves it with a tiny fraction of the digital audience of competitors like the NHL.)
Litz sees the growth among younger viewers, and an increased percentage of female viewers (up seven per cent in 2016), plus the digital inroads, as proof the long-held criticisms of the CFL as a bastion of old, white dudes are outdated.
“It’s become a myth now,” she says.
Certainly, the league is aware the days of assuming people will leave their lounge chairs and their large TVs for a hard plastic seat and a simple football game are over.
“I think there’s been a recognition by our teams that the sports fan is changing,” Litz says.
She points to the carnival-party atmosphere present outside the gates in places like Winnipeg, Ottawa and Hamilton, which can offer everything from beer gardens to bouncy castles.
“Teams are getting good at paying attention to that as part of the experience,” Litz says.
Investing in those experiences, however, has been necessary because attendance was falling.
The B.C. Lions were averaging more than 32,000 fans a decade ago and were down to about 21,000 last season.
The Alouettes were routinely selling out in 2010-11, but with the glory days of the Anthony Calvillo years firmly behind them, they are no longer quite that hot a ticket, playing to about 86 per cent capacity last season.
Not a crisis, no. But cause for concern.
For the next commissioner, there is work to do.