Argos need more than just BMO Field

But it was either new surroundings or watch team die

For years, the lament that has followed the cash-poor, attendancechallenged, forever-in-doubt Toronto Argonauts would only make sense to someone familiar with the team’s unique circumstances. If only, its supporters would say, we had a smaller stadium.

So, the key to reviving the money-losing CFL team is to provide it with an opportunity to make less money? Interesting.

Happily for all involved, just such a chance has come to pass. Larry Tanenbaum and Bell Canada confirmed on Wednesday that they — two-thirds of the partners in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment — are buying the Argos from businessman David Braley for an undisclosed amount and moving them into MLSE’s lakefront BMO Field for the 2016 football season.

That stadium, a quaint park near the site of the old Exhibition Stadium, is presently undergoing renovations that will make it somewhat less quaint, which is the key to the whole enterprise. Asked on Wednesday to explain his plan for turning around the off-field fortunes of the Argos, whose attendance eroded last season to an average of about 17,000 fans in the cavernous Rogers Centre, where you could pick out individual cheers and horn bleats from whole sections away, Tanenbaum basically said the stadium was the plan. Give people the chance to see a CFL game at a great, fun stadium, he said, and they will come.

It will take a lot more than that. The fact that it took Tanenbaum, Bell and Braley more than a year to work out the particulars of this sale — Rogers, the third MLSE partner, wanted no part of the purchase — is all the evidence needed that the Argos had little value to a potential buyer. Braley himself acknowledged on Wednesday that when he bought the team in 2010, he expected he would only hold onto it for a couple of years. He was a stop-gap owner, not a saviour. As the seasons went by and the Argos couldn’t parlay on-field success into stability off of it, the team had an owner who wanted to sell, a stadium from which it was being evicted, no prospective buyer, and the only viable solution kept tracing back to MLSE. Or at least parts of it.

So: it was either figure out something like this or watch the Argos die. Tanenbaum and Bell each have their reasons for not wanting to see that happen.

But the deal is also perfectly in keeping with the awkward recent history that exists between the Argonauts and Toronto. One of the major reasons that the team has failed to prosper here is the perception that the CFL is a second-rate league in a town that tends to turn up its nose at such things. That perception began with its ownership, with Braley, who already owned the B.C. Lions, taking the Argos off the hands of businessmen Howard Sokolow- ski and David Cynamon more than five years ago. It is an odd look when one guy, as was the case at the time, owns 25% of your league’s teams.

The new arrangement is similarly curious. Bell, which owns the CFL’s media rights through 2018 via its TSN subsidiary, now owns the franchise based in the league’s biggest and least successful market. Fans elsewhere in the league will now suspect that every call, trade and suspension that benefits the Argos will be a result of the CFL favouring the Toronto franchise as a favour to Bell and TSN, the single entity to which the league owes the most gratitude for its growth over the past decade. Whether the inevitable accusations of favouritism will be fair is another thing entirely, but the conflict exists, and non-Toronto fans already believe the fix is in, as evidenced by the wide-eyed reaction to the Ricky Ray trade in 2011.

That controversy over Toronto bias, though, is going to be a brush fire when compared with the conflagration sure to be caused by supporters of Toronto FC, the beleaguered soccer team that will now have their pristine pitch trodden upon by a bunch of very heavy men in cleats at least nine times a year.

When the Argos-to-BMO rumours were first floated, it was widely assumed that the move would require a return to the dreaded artificial turf, since no one imagined that a grass field could survive the abuse of a series of CFL games. But grass it is. Tim Leiweke, the outgoing MLSE boss, swore up and down on Wednesday that the grass field will not be a problem. “If you look at the pitch today, that’s what it will look like three years from now, five years from now,” he said. It’s a bold statement from someone whose tenure in Toronto has been notable for bold proclamations and failure to fulfil them, more or less in succession. One wet Argos game — it has been known to rain in Toronto in the fall — could easily chew up the field enough to make it unplayable for soccer, although Leiweke appears to have great faith in the advances of horticulture. Even if they get lucky and the pitch is rendered simply passable, it’s hard to imagine that it won’t end up being something less than it is today. TFC fans view this as a finger in their collective eye, even after they have remained loyal to a franchise that makes the Maple Leafs look like pillars of competence.

The TFC crowd has long held — pleaded, really — that the Argo problem should be solved with a stadium in the suburbs, but those solutions were never realistic. The team wasn’t an attractive asset on its own, so the Argos and nine figures’ worth of stadium debt had all the appeal of, well, nine figures’ worth of stadium debt.

This outcome, with the existing stadium, and the pleasant lakefront location, was the only one on offer. For some time now, it has been the thing that would save the Argos: move the team into a cosy park, and out of the sad, echoing emptiness of the Rogers Centre, and CFL football would become a thing in Toronto again. It would be the Alouettes West.

But the Argos are always one plan away from being saved. They needed a real quarterback, and they needed to be competitive, and then they got Ray and won the Grey Cup — at home — in 2012. That was a springboard to two years of declining attendance.

The Argonauts are a long way from being a thing in this town. The stadium is a start. But it’s just a start.