Game plan, please
Cash-crunched CFL must embrace full transparency
REGINA — The CFL wants the federal government to open the vault. In return, the league should open the books.
Commissioner Randy Ambrosie is amenable to allowing politicians to peruse the finer financial details, but that information should be accessible to everyone.
Ambrosie, who has asked for assistance that begins at $30 million and may mushroom to five times as much, has cited the CFL’s desire to be accountable to taxpayers.
Accordingly, the league should be fully transparent to those very same taxpayers — who would ultimately be the benefactors.
Government support for a professional sporting enterprise is a tough sell at the best of times. In the midst of a global pandemic, COVID-19, a convincing case is especially difficult to make.
Hence the need for full disclosure.
If taxpayers are to be suitably informed, they deserve specific information about matters that the league would not ordinarily divulge.
Is the money going to support quarterbacks who are said to earn $700,000 per annum? What, exactly, do Bo Levi Mitchell (Calgary Stampeders) and Mike Reilly (B.C. Lions) really make?
Why is anyone in a smaller-scale professional sports league paid that much, anyway? Surely, the premier pivots would play for considerably less — say, a wage comparable to that of Cody Fajardo — if need be. The Saskatchewan Roughriders’ marquee player is to earn $400,000-plus during the 2020 season, in the unlikely event that there is one.
Diving even deeper into dollars, to what degree are general managers compensated? How about coaches?
Can coaching staffs be scaled back? The players, after all, are the show.
Yes, salary caps are in place to cover the players and football-operations personnel, but within those parameters the teams’ spending must be shown to be judicious — especially when the collective deficit is between $10 million and $20 million.
Beyond that, the issue of administrative expenses at the league and team levels must be addressed.
How much is Ambrosie making? What compensation do the presidents and CEOs command? Are they taking pay cuts? If not, why not?
How much money is spent on Canadian scouting as opposed to scouring the United States for prospective CFLers?
Put everything on the table. If the league is indeed deserving of a federal bailout, there shouldn’t be anything to hide.
Full transparency would be a much better look than Ambrosie presented Thursday, when he made the CFL’s case to a House of Commons standing committee on finance.
“Our best-case scenario for this year is a drastically truncated season,” he said. “And our most likely scenario is no season at all.”
Ambrosie added that COVID-19 has left the league’s future “very much in jeopardy.”
The CFL, a cherished Canadian institution, is certainly worth preserving. However, the federal government should not consider handing over as much as a nickel until the league ups its game.
To use football parlance: Game plan, please.
Information regarding the players’ role in the equation would be beneficial. In fact, it should have been a fundamental component of Ambrosie’s presentation.
“We weren’t consulted before the proposal went out,” Roughriders linebacker Solomon Elimimian, president of the CFL Players’ Association, told Postmedia’s Dan Barnes. “We should have been consulted.”
Elimimian added: “I like to feel the CFL is a big community. We’re all in this together and I don’t think that was articulated the best way by the commissioner.”
Ambrosie was grilled by a number of elected officials, including Saskatoon-Grasswood MP Kevin Waugh.
“I thought (on Thursday) Randy Ambrosie was ill-prepared,” Waugh told CJME’s Green Zone. “He thought this was going to be a love-in and it was far from it.”
The outcome was surprising, really, because the congenial commissioner is usually masterful at working a room and selling his message.
Therefore, it was accepted here as a given that Ambrosie would represent the CFL just as impressively with untold millions of dollars — and perhaps the league’s very existence — at stake.
So much for presumptions. Ambrosie now finds himself in a second-and-long situation when it comes to winning over power brokers and their constituents.
A common ground must be reached, and a comprehensive plan must be developed, in close consultation with the CFLPA.
That being done, the next step of the pleading process must be executed in flawless fashion.
An improved, more inclusive showing by the commissioner is especially crucial in Saskatchewan, where taxpayers could be on the hook regardless of whether they end up bankrolling a bailout as part of a federal levy.
Consider new Mosaic Stadium, a $278.2-million edifice that officially opened in 2017.
Included in the funding arrangement was a$100-million loan that the City of Regina took out from the Province of Saskatchewan.
The blueprint called for that loan to be repaid over 30 years via the application of a $12 facility fee to tickets for major events, principally Roughriders games.
Now, only three years into the Roughriders’ tenancy, nobody can say with any certainty when — or if? — another CFL game will be played at Mosaic Stadium.
Suppose that the onceunthinkable happens and the league folds. What about a loan-repayment tab exceeding $90 million? Try ingesting that one, taxpayers.
Plus, there would be costs incurred by maintaining a stadium of exponentially larger dimensions than Regina would require to house amateur football games and other lower-profile sporting events.
In 2017, the stadium’s operational costs were projected at between $4 million and $5 million per year. It is unclear how much the disappearance of the Roughriders would reduce those costs — covering maintenance, custodial services, security, telecommunications, etc. — but the cost of upkeep would still be significant.
Also consider $1.53 million in annual rental charges that the Roughriders pay to the city, per a 30-year lease agreement.
A major concert or two per year would not be nearly enough to justify the amount of money that a 33,000-seat green and white elephant would ravenously devour.
With that doomsday scenario in mind, civic and provincial taxpayers should be rooting for the federal government to come through with emergency funding.
But, first and foremost, the league must bail itself out by filling the cavernous holes in its request for up to $150 million. Full transparency would be an important first step in that direction.