Canada high on NFL’s list for future games
The NFL scouted four Canadian stadiums in 2016 as candidate sites for future regularseason games, Postmedia News has learned.
NFL executive vice-president Mark Waller said in an interview on Wednesday that league reps last year visited Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Toronto’s Rogers Centre, Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium and Vancouver’s B.C. Place Stadium. The latter two are home to CFL teams.
Following commissioner Roger Goodell’s annual pre-Super Bowl news conference, Waller told Postmedia there were two big reasons he and his team visited the four Canadian stadiums in person: to see if team locker-rooms were sufficient and to see if those venues meet the NFL’s technological standards.
The NFL has not yet reached a conclusion on a Canadian venue, Waller said, nor does it disclose findings of such research.
The NFL is contracted to play at least three games annually in the United Kingdom through 2020. Four games will be played in England in 2017, and Goodell announced Wednesday a game will be played in Mexico City this fall.
In October 2015, Waller had said Canada is among top candidate countries the league wants to expand to, after the U.K., Mexico and probably Germany.
“We also visited a number of German cities (in 2016), just so you have that as context,” Waller said Wednesday. “And we do that all the time. We’ve looked at stadiums in Brazil. I’ve looked at stadiums in Australia and China. That’s our job …
“We have a great fan base up there in Canada … It’s a great market for us. I would love to be back there and obviously, from a logistical standpoint, a scheduling standpoint, a broadcast standpoint, that’s much easier for us than a game in Germany and certainly a game in China. So I would have Canada high on the list.”
However, Waller said the NFL head office has a big issue north of the border.
“I think the only dark cloud for us at the moment is the CRTC ruling on the Super Bowl broadcast,” Waller said. “That impacts us very negatively.”
Bell Media owns Englishlanguage NFL telecast rights in Canada and airs all playoff games, plus Sunday and Monday regularseason games, on its CTV or TSN channels.
The CRTC in August altered a long-standing policy to allow only U.S. ads to be aired during the Canadian broadcast of the Super Bowl. The CRTC’s decision is “incredibly discriminatory,” Waller said, because the policy has been changed for only one event.
“The Bell broadcast of the Super Bowl is a hugely important platform for Canadian businesses, Canadian creative companies, Canadian creative agencies — businesses that maybe don’t need to advertise in the U.S., or don’t want to or even can’t afford to,” Waller said.
Bell and the NFL are fighting the CRTC in court.