Canada could host future NFL games
League has taken a look at stadiums in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Edmonton
The NFL scouted four Canadian stadiums in 2016 as candidate sites for possible future regular season games, Postmedia has learned.
Mark Waller, the NFL’s executive vice-president of international, said in an interview 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.
In the interview, Waller talked up Canada as a future host of a regular-season “international” game or games.
He added, however, that a “dark cloud” hangs over Canada regarding the CRTC’s decision to allow U.S. commercials to be shown during Sunday’s Super Bowl LI. More on that in a moment.
Following commissioner Roger Goodell’s annual pre-Super Bowl news conference, Waller told Postmedia he and his team visited the four Canadian stadiums in person for two main reasons: to see if team locker-rooms were sufficient and to see if those venues meet NFL technological standards.
The NFL has not yet reached a conclusion on a Canadian venue, Waller said, nor does it disclose findings of such information missions.
The NFL is contracted to play at least three games annually in the U.K. through 2020. Four games will be played in England in 2017.
Goodell announced Wednesday a game this fall will be played in Mexico City for the second straight year.
In October 2015, Waller said Canada is among top candidate countries the league wants to expand to, after the U.K. and Mexico and probably Germany.
“We also visited a number of German cities (in 2016), just so you have that as context,” Waller said on 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.”
But Waller is now stopping short of suggesting Germany remains ahead of Canada in the queue.
“We have a great fan base up there in Canada. It’s a great market for us,” he said. “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.”
While it’s not easy for the league to free up enough teams willing to play international games, both Toronto and Montreal are a short plane ride from many NFL teams.
For some NFL teams, Toronto and Montreal are a shorter flight away than one or more division rivals, just as Vancouver is much closer to Seattle than any of the Seahawks’ three NFC West foes.
“We’re pleased with the development of taking regular season games internationally,” Waller said. “But we want to go to more countries and we want to go back to Canada. We’re very proud of the fact we have such a great fan base there.”
The NFL head office has one big issue with North America’s largest country by land mass, however.
Bell Media owns English-language NFL telecast rights in Canada and airs all playoff games — plus Sunday and Monday regular-season games — on its CTV or TSN channels.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in August altered a long-standing policy for just the Super Bowl to allow big-buzz U.S. ads to be aired during the game.
For decades the standard practice has been for Canadian TV rights-holders to sub in their own domestic commercials. That’s how networks recoup their rights fees.
The CRTC’s decision is “incredibly discriminatory,” Waller said, because the policy has been changed only for one event: the Super Bowl.
“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,” he said. “So that right is being taken away.”
The Financial Post reported Tuesday that Bell Media maintains it will lose millions in revenue, a factor in its decision to eliminate more than two dozen jobs across Canada.
Bell and the NFL are fighting the CRTC in court.
Canadian fans for decades have been livid they can’t see the debut of highly popular ads during the Super Bowl.
“I understand the argument that, from a fan perspective, it would be great to see the American commercials,” Waller said, “But those commercials were bought, paid for and due to run in America — not in Canada, Mexico or anywhere else.”