So much must go right for CFL to take the field

AMBROSIE ‘CONFIDENT’ SEASON WON’T BE LOST, BUT ADMITS A LOT IS OUT OF HIS HANDS

For an announcement that was intended to provide clarity on the Canadian Football League season in 2021, Randy Ambrosie’s new target date sure does come with a lot of uncertainty.

While the CFL commissioner stated on Wednesday that the league “will play football” this year and that, even if a shortened season cannot begin as now planned on Aug. 5, he remains “absolutely confident” that another league campaign will not be entirely lost, Ambrosie admitted the whole thing is out of his hands. He needs provincial health authorities to sign off on return-to-play protocols, which will only happen in the event of several sustained weeks of improvement in the fight against COVID-19. And he needs, he said, “significant” numbers of fans in the stands to mitigate the losses that would come from playing in front of empty stadiums.

Even more has to go right for that last condition to come to pass. It is certainly possible that ramped-up vaccinations and continued public health restrictions will significantly change the picture in the worst-hit provinces over the next six weeks, but there’s no guarantee that governments that have been repeatedly burned by loosening restrictions will be eager to allow large outdoor gatherings by midsummer. In his comments this week, Ambrosie seems to have accepted that Quebec and Ontario will be slow to move on that front, and has suggested that the season could begin with several straight weeks of games in the Prairies, giving the two provinces in the East more time to get comfortable with the idea of fans in stands. But that idea seems to have skipped right past the point that, presently, Alberta’s new-case rate per capita is higher than that of Ontario, and that Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia all have higher new-case rates today than does Quebec. If the league is resolute that paying customers must to some significant degree be present in order to justify a 2021 season then again, a lot of good pandemic news needs to break Canada’s way over the next short while.

But the fans-in-stands question also leads to an even bigger uncertainty, one that stretches back to the cancellation of the 2020 season: How many of the league’s owners are truly committed to seeing their teams return to the field? As was the case last year, Ambrosie insists there simply cannot be CFL football in front of empty stands. He says more than half of the league’s revenue comes from game-day fans, although with only three of nine clubs opening their books publicly, that number cannot be vetted. The commissioner notes that the CFL doesn’t have the giant TV deals of the big four North American leagues, which allowed them to return to play while fans stayed home. And that’s true. But Major League Soccer came back. Major junior hockey returned in parts of the country. The Canadian Premier League, a fledgling soccer outfit, was back last summer. The National Women’s Soccer League returned for a spell, as did the WNBA. Golf, tennis, rugby, cricket, auto racing: all kinds of sports organizations found ways to hold events amid unfavourable economic conditions. And while the bigger leagues do indeed have fat TV deals, they also have massive expenses. An entire CFL roster would make about one-quarter of what the Toronto Blue Jays will pay George Springer this season.

So why does the CFL not want to consider playing in the same type of environment that so many other leagues have done? It was said last year that at least some teams wanted to play in 2020 despite a lack of financial assistance from Ottawa, although clearly not enough of those owners carried the day. And now the league is back at a similar point, with at least some of the ownership groups holding out for game-day revenues before they would consider resuming play. All of it points to something that we’ve now known for a while: business is so bad in some of the league’s markets that the clubs would rather not operate at all than play games that would generate losses even steeper than those in a regular year. Can the CFL survive when there is such a divide between the healthy franchises and those that continually struggle in the big cities?

That same divide underscores whatever the league is up to in its talks with the XFL. Ambrosie has said this week that those discussions are about improving the CFL’S business model through some kind of collaboration. What he has avoided saying is that the Canadian league would have to part with much of its unique format and structure if it was going to enter into on-field competition with an American league. The commissioner says they haven’t yet discussed matters like field dimensions or rules, which seems to have it exactly backwards. Aren’t those the things that need to be agreed upon first, before a league with the CFL’S history agrees to hitch itself to a twicefailed upstart?

Again, the sense is that reliable CFL markets are understandably leery of merger talk, while the big cities, where the product is wheezing anyway, are more open to dramatic change.

Ambrosie is an optimistic fellow, and to talk to him is to hear someone who is undeniably passionate about the league he leads. But those things were all true at this time last year, too. It didn’t help the CFL play any games.

A LOT OF GOOD PANDEMIC NEWS NEEDS TO BREAK CANADA’S WAY.