MIGHT ARGOS FINALLY SELL OUT AT HOME?

Toronto on pace to break attendance record at BMO Field, but there’s still work to do

Professional sports teams do not announce how ticket sales are progressing unless they have good news to share.

In related news, the Toronto Argonauts almost never make ticket sales announcements.

But funny thing. On Wednesday, the Argos let it be known they had passed 20,000 tickets for the CFL’s East final at BMO Field this weekend. In an interview a day earlier, Michael Copeland, the team’s president and chief executive, told me he thought a crowd size around the 24,000-plus that came to the club’s first game at BMO Field last year was a possibility.

“I mean, we’re hoping that this will be the biggest crowd that we’ve had at BMO Field,” Copeland said of Sunday’s game against the Saskatchewan Roughriders. “Certainly that’s well within our reach, that’s what we’re pushing for and our numbers to date suggest we have a really good chance of getting there.”

An actual, positive angle to CFL ticket sales in Toronto: just another way 2017 is feeling like the end times.

But this bit of good news for the Argos is also a reminder of the work ahead and the likely long slog back to relevancy in this market. It is a long way from the big talk dating back many years of how a downtown stadium would quickly unlock an Argos rebirth. And it’s a considerable way from the optimism that was displayed as recently as two years ago, when the new ownership group said it was moving the team into BMO Field and expected big crowds would soon follow.

How much have those expectations since been tempered? Let’s say the Argos do get a record crowd for CFL football at the waterfront stadium, more than 25,000 or even — gasp! — a sellout of something close to 27,000 tickets. That crowd, good as it would be for the Argos in this city, would be for a championship semifinal in which the team had an extra week to sell tickets. It would also be smaller than the announced crowd for every one of the Blue Jays’ 81 home dates this season down the street at the Rogers Centre. It would be right around the average crowd size for Toronto FC’s 17 regular-season games at BMO Field this year.

A step forward, for sure, but a modest one. Maybe not a baby step, but a wobbly toddler one.

Copeland, though, says that because the owners are patient, incremental change is fine as long as it is moving in the right direction. He says he knows there has been skepticism about a rebound since the moment Larry Tanenbaum and Bell bought the team in 2015 and when he took over as president following that season.

“And I think too often the emphasis in this market has been how fast are you going to get there?” he says. “And the viability of the franchise, the viability of football (here), is often equated with how quickly you are going to be able to address the issues.

“What I can tell you is that I have every confidence and expectation that our attendance is going to be greater next year than it is this year and it’s going to be greater in 2019 than it is in 2018,” Copeland says. “And I think that is going to be a consistent theme.”

Such pledges are made easier by the fact that the bar was set surprisingly low this year. After a dismal first season at BMO in which the Argos crashed out of the playoff picture early and saw attendance sag from the promise of the home opener to an average of fewer than 17,000 fans, the team drew significantly fewer fans this season. An onfield turnaround under new head coach Marc Trestman and GM Jim Popp created a better product, but the stadium was less than half full multiple times in 2017.

That wasn’t the plan, exactly, but the team also avoided inflating attendance numbers through steep discounts and giveaways. The slow-and-steady program would mean that the Argonauts wouldn’t try to convince fans of the value of a paid ticket while also giving thousands of them away. The risk of that plan was the prospect of a lot of empty red seats.

“At some point you have to make the decision to take the pain and we did that this year,” Copeland says.

It’s also true that as much as the team did improve this season, they weren’t the kind of world beaters out of the gate that would inspire Argos Fever in a town that long ago acquired immunity to that affliction. They didn’t win consecutive games until weeks 13 and 14, which only lifted their record to 6-7, and even the East Division title came with a 9-9 record. Room for growth remains there, too.

Copeland says that until the season-ticket base is substantial — it is less than 5,000 now — they will keep trying to lure fans in with a big game-day experience: beer gardens, tailgates, er, bouncy castles. He says families have been a big growth area.

“It’s more like a picnic than what you would see in other U.S. cities,” Copeland says of the Argos’ tailgate.

Like Buffalo, N.Y?

“You said it, I didn’t,” he says. It’s true: I have never seen someone thrown through a flaming table at the BMO Field parking lot.

But Copeland says getting more people to experience Argos football, this new version of it, will be the key to continued growth. The East final will help. As would, one imagines, a Grey Cup.