Canada on NFL’s game radar
Regular-season contests possible in 4 cities
The NFL scouted four Canadian stadiums in 2016 as candidate sites for possible future regular-season games, Postmedia has learned.
Mark Waller, the NFL’s executive vice- president of international, said in an i nterview on Wednesday that league reps last year visited Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Toronto’s Rogers Centre, Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium and Vancouver’s BC Place Stadium.
The latter two are home to CFL teams.
In the interview, Waller talked up Canada as a future host of a regular-season “i nternational” game or games.
He added, h o wever, that a “dark cloud” hangs over Canada r e garding the CRTC’s decision to all ow U. S. commercials to be shown during Sunday’s Super Bowl LI. More on that in a moment.
Following commissioner Roger Goodell’s annual pre- Super Bowl news conference, Waller told Postmedia that he and his team visited the four Canadian stadiums in person for two main reasons: first, to see if team locker-rooms were sufficient and, secondly, to see if those venues meet NFL technological standards.
The NFL has not yet reached a conclusion on a Canadian venue, Waller said, nor does it disclose findings of such information missions.
The NFL is contracted to play at least three games annually in the United Kingdom through 2020. Four games will be played in England in 2017.
Goodell announced Wednesday a game this fall will be played in Mexico City for the second straight year.
While it’s not easy for the league to free up enough willing teams to play in i nternational games, the reality is both Toronto and Montreal are a short plane ride from many NFL teams situated in the U.S. Northeast.
In fact for some NFL teams, Toronto and Montreal area shorter flight away than one or more division rivals, just as Vancouver is much closer to Seattle than any of the Seahawks’ three NFC West foes.
“We’re pleased with the development of taking regular games internationally,” Waller said. “But we want to go to more countries and we want to go back to Canada. We’re very proud of the fact we have such a great fan base there.”
The NFL head office has one big issue with North America’s largest country by land mass, however.
“I think the only dark cloud for us at the moment is the CRTC ruling on the Super Bowl broadcast,” Waller said. “That impacts us very negatively.”
Bell Media owns English- language NFL telecast rights in Canada and airs all playoff games — plus Sunday and Monday regularseason games — on its CTV or TSN family of channels.
The Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission ( CRTC) in August altered a long- standing policy for just the Super Bowl to allow big-buzz U.S. ads to be aired during the game.
For decades t he standard practice, annoying or not, has been for Canadian TV rights- holders to sub in their own domestic commercials for any popular out- of- country sports event, such as The Masters or U.S. college football games. That’s how networks recoup their rights fees.
The CRTC’s decision is “incredibly discriminatory,” Waller said, because the policy has been changed only for one event: the Super Bowl.
“I think from a fan’s perspective it’s very simple: Bell and other broadcast partners pay significant rights fees to us to bring our content in, and the way that that works is they’re enabled to sell on that content and take advertising into the game (telecast),” he said.
The Financial Post reported Tuesday that Bell Media maintains it will lose millions of dollars in revenue, a factor in its decision to eliminate more than two dozen jobs across Canada.
Bell and t he NFL are fighting the CRTC in court.
Some Canadian fans for decades have been livid they can’t see the debut of highly popular ads during the Super Bowl, which soak social media for hours or days afterward.
“I understand the argument that, from a fan perspective, it would be great to see the American commercials,” Waller said, “but those commercials were bought, paid for and due to run in America — not in Canada, Mexico or anywhere else.”
It’s probably true that if the NFL, and particularly the Super Bowl telecast, weren’t so popular in Canada, the policy might never have changed.
“I just think it’s wrong,” Waller said, “that we get penalized and our partners get penalized for that popularity — penalized legislatively and economically. That does not seem right.”
VERY PROUD OF THE FACT WE HAVE SUCH A GREAT FAN BASE THERE.