CFL must market game to younger fans as number of diehards dwindles
Commissioner’s Grey Cup message is that of a league in transition
The audience of a few hundred people in a ballroom at a downtown Toronto hotel on Friday morning is not one that CFL commissioner Jeffrey Orridge needs to win over.
The crowd is bedecked in a riot of CFL colours, sporting jerseys from new (Jonathan Jennings) to old (Terry Greer) to very old (Vince Ferragamo). There are men in homemade coveralls that declare ‘Our Balls are Bigger,’ men with flashing-light helmets that say the Fun Police — which sounds like people who should be trying to limit the fun, but probably do the opposite — and one guy in tight gold pants — like, really tight — and a Blue Bombers jersey that says ‘Blue Bastard’ on the back because why wouldn’t you want to identify yourself as such?
There are even elements of the CFL that are long since dead: the gentleman in a Baltimore Stallions bomber jacket, with what looks like homemade Grey Cup Champs ’95 stitching, and someone in an actual David Archer jersey. He played for both the Sacramento Gold Miners and San Antonio Texans. The jersey is a Texans model and must be one of a very few in existence.
When Orridge finishes his remarks and the floor is opened to questions, a woman in a Roughriders cowboy hat asks earnestly about player safety and concussions. “What are you doing to protect the guys?,” she asks, and the question is perfectly appropriate as a reflection of the room’s mood toward the Canadian Football League. These people care about it, a lot.
It’s the rest of the country that Orridge has to worry about. The commissioner is armed with a lot of numbers to build his case that the CFL is in an excellent place.
Television numbers remain strong — up slightly this season over last — thanks to the partnership with TSN, which has the league as such a key tentpole of its programming that its owner helped buy the Toronto Argonauts when no one else would.
There are new stadiums in Ottawa, Hamilton, Winnipeg and, next year, Regina, while the Argos were finally moved out of the Rogers Centre, home to empty blue seats and the occasional sad bleat of a plastic horn.
The teams with new facilities have made game days more of an event, all part of a larger plan to give fans reason to leave the comfort of their couches and flat-screen TVs, and to get them to spend extra money to do it.
But it is also telling that in this room full of CFL diehards, the people who travel across the country every year to attend its signature event, there are concerns raised about the league’s future. A season-ticket holder from Vancouver notes that the team had its third-lowest attendance at B.C. Place this past season. He wonders why the CFL isn’t marketing to the people outside of the room: millennials, new Canadians, kids and teens.
Montreal’s on-again, off-again relationship with the Alouettes is currently trending toward off, and in Toronto, the work to rebuild a near-dead brand was in 2016 off to a tough start. Attendance leaguewide was down slightly this year over last.
Another fan, this one from Hamilton, asks why the Grey Cup isn’t available on something other than pay cable. His sons, both Tiger-Cats fans, watch everything online and they can’t get the championship game. It reminds him, he says, of when the CFL used to blackout games on television.
“We lost a generation of fans then,” he says. “We’re losing a generation now.”
Orridge parries the various thrusts with the grace of someone who knows that the questions are coming. He says he knows that the CFL must attract new fans, “and the great news is that we’ve started that initiative.”
He talks about “being where the next generation of fans are,” and goes on to rattle off stats about the league’s new-media presence.
Visits to a revamped CFL.ca are up 100 per cent, and he says the CFL is up 37 per cent on Facebook, 80 per cent on Twitter and 293 per cent on Instagram.
But when you start from nothing, it doesn’t take much to amount to something. Where the NHL has the 57th-most popular website in Canada, according to traffic analyst Alexa, that 100 per cent growth for the CFL’s website has it up to 1,750th.
While web traffic numbers are notoriously difficult to gauge precisely, SimilarWeb also had the CFL in the 1,700-range in the Canada, suggesting that if the league is making inroads with a younger, digitally inclined audience, there remains much room to grow. (TSN was ranked 90th.)
As much as the CFL in Toronto has proven to be a difficult sell, with the Argos’ troubles and now a Grey Cup that needed a lastminute sales push at reduced prices to approach a sellout, there is something fitting about having the title game back here.
The Argonauts need to reach out to new fans, all kinds of them. The CFL, starting from a much more stable base, has less of a crisis on its hands. But it, too, needs to find those new fans.
The crowd at the Grey Cup Festival taking place across from the hotel at which Orridge was speaking was sparse on Friday afternoon, but more than that it was quite visibly not young. The CFL doesn’t need this people, in their cowboy hats and eating pancake burgers — an actual thing! — and posing with the Stampeders cheerleaders, to keep growing into the next decade. It needs their kids.
Orridge, back at the hotel, was explaining his marketing plan when he offered a suggestion to the assembled CFL lovers: “Tell your friends.”
It will take something more than that.