Successful Argos a key for CFL
TORONTO — You want, oh how you want, to say to that this is a work in progress. But while it’s so obviously work, the progress part isn’t at all perceptible.
The Toronto Argonauts came off a 2017 Grey Cup championship which should have been a serious selling-point advantage, even in a market saturated with pro sport and other entertainment options.
But it’s been a lonely year down here on the Toronto lakeshore. From the early going there have been yawning spaces in the BMO Field stands, and the eastern upper bowl was closed off because it wasn’t remotely needed.
Prior to Friday night’s game against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats — which got a boost from the usual eastward trek of Ticat Nation and a few hundred Ryerson students on a special promotion — the Argos had drawn more than 17,000 fans just once all year, and had never reached 19,000. One early season game, they didn’t even reach 11,000.
We’ll repeat: the Argonauts won the Grey Cup last year. So if you can’t sell off that, how do you sell coming off a season in which they were eliminated from the playoffs a more than a month before they actually stop playing?
Their final four games are so lame-duck they should have their own charity.
BMO Field is a great place to watch a football game, the grandstand ceilings amplify noise well beyond that produced by the crowd, and the in-game promotions are good enough.
So it’s primarily a matter of selling that initial ticket: getting fans into the stadium the first time. You won’t always keep all of them there, especially if you go around winning just three of your first 14 games, but you can’t keep anyone there if they don’t get there in the first place.
There are no quick fixes here. This thing was pulled apart a brick at a time over a quartercentury and won’t be rebuilt in giant chunks.
At least the Argos are owned by a group, MLSE, which has a long-term stake in putting bums in the seats because they control the stadium.
That is a major plus. Maybe they can tie season’s ticket waiting lists for Toronto FC, which they also own, to Argo purchases, and get some of that younger demographic to at least try the other kind of football.
Whatever, Argonaut success off the field is critical to the CFL — Toronto is where the advertisers, and largest TV market live — and, in many ways, to the TigerCats.
The Ticats are umbilicaly tied to the Argos. So much of their mythology, and fact, is built around Labour Day and postseason confrontations with their impossibly close geographical rivals.
Historically in football, if Toronto sneezes, Hamilton says “Bless You!” ... although not in exactly those words nor that tone of voice.
The Ticat-Argo rivalry is so much better, so much healthier, so much more relevant, when both teams are strong both on and off the field.
The CFL, and owners in both cities, have invested a lot of time and financial resources in southern Ontario over the past 15 years, but they’ve taken root only in one city.
It’s going to take a long time, and a lot of legwork — almost door-to-door legwork — to equalize that again.
It’ll never be like it was in the 1960s, when the narrative was so blatantly David vs. Goliath. But it doesn’t work nearly as well with Toronto as David.