CFL team took a couple costly hits last year
CFL season that never was left the club short $7.1 million and effectively nameless
They may not have lost a game, but they lost their name and it turns out Edmonton EE also lost $7.1 million.
Considering the coronavirus pandemic, maybe you score the community-owned club that sees itself as CFL'S flagship franchise as champions of the 2020 non-season.
Everything considered, it was a pretty positive annual general meeting for the club Monday where the Nervous Nine board of directors, under outgoing chair Janice Agrios, was never really nervous.
But it might not be a place for a nervous person going forward with a new team name replacing “Eskimos” that nobody is likely to want — and with talks involving merger with the XFL.
The incoming chair is Ian Murray who, as treasurer, managed the money last year.
Murray, 59, is a born-andraised Edmontonian who went to Eskimos games as a kid, played high school football at Harry Ainlay and junior for the Huskies. He's the head of a consulting firm that deals with challenging projects.
“We do kind of special projects, mostly involving the building of something new. I think it's a relevant background to be able to look at both what some of the difficulties are and what some of the opportunities are,” he said in a one-on-one interview following the virtual AGM.
As the treasurer, it obviously was a challenging year. The club's heritage trust fund emerged untouched at $15,359,808, with an additional $4,980,524 remaining in cash on hand.
“We're fortunate the trust fund is there,” Murray said.
“We tried to manage things quite frugally and aggressively to try to avoid having to dip into the trust fund and put off as long as we can having to do that. We did take a pretty aggressive approach toward reducing expenses — more than most of the teams.
“So, under the circumstances, we're pretty good. We're in a better place than some other teams are. And we're also in a better place than we might have been.”
After recording revenue of $23.5 million in 2019, the figure fell to $3.8 million, most of it resulting from a very quietly obtained government assistance figure of $2,531,061, merchandise profits of $672,498 and surviving sponsorship of $475,664 from the $5,917,823 brought in the year before.
The team cut operating expenses 55 per cent, mostly through layoffs, but still spent $3,919,915 to pay players and coaches who didn't play or coach, including a reported half million to former head coach Scott Milanovich, who didn't coach a game and resigned at the end of the non-season to return to the NFL.
Agrios, the first female chair in the history of the club, never had a chance, and Murray insists she probably put in more hours than any EE chair in history.
“The challenges we anticipated at this time last year turned out to be even more profound than we could have ever envisioned,” Agrios reported.
By CFL standards, this is one very healthy franchise emerging from the pandemic — if indeed that turns out to be the case with a return to play plan featuring a shortened 14-game schedule beginning in early August.
New president and chief executive Chris Presson showed up and “was forced to reduce the core business and football operation components to a skeleton operation.”
Presson said he believes they succeeded.
“We remained committed to building a championship calibre football team while sustaining the relationship with our fans, customers, partners and rights holders.”
Murray doesn't have a normal transition for an incoming chair, either, but said he has several contingencies for the coming season, from a 14-game schedule to zero.
“Our worst-case contingency would be to start and being forced to stop. Regardless, when we model this up, we'd be able to start the next year. We are really fortunate that we didn't have a lot of refund requests from season ticket holders. There's a lot of negative going on but I think that one thing that is a really big deal is the number of our season ticket holders that are patient,” Murray said.
“I found the name thing very difficult, as did most of the board. The plan to move forward recognizes that there will be a lot of folks who are going to be unhappy no matter what we do. But I think they'll give us a fair shake.
“Chris Presson and his team have done a lot of work and I think you'll find that when they do come forward with a new rollout with the new name that they do a good job. And I think you'll be surprised that we convert a lot more folks than you think we will.”
There wasn't even a mention of the XFL at the AGM.
It's getting close to the time, Murray said, for the board to represent the fans here, something that hasn't been done in a place where three-down, 110yard football is believed to be a better game, where the most important word in Canadian Football League has always been Canadian, and where the product has never been viewed as minor league.
“In the next couple of weeks, I think the board will sit down and talk about where we're at with this,” Murray said. “I'm pretty confident the Edmonton Football Team will go above and beyond the call of duty to try to protect what I believe we'd view as sort of community tradition.”