GAME OVER FOR CFL SEASON
Lions turn focus to 2021
There will be no Grey Cup game this fall for the first time in 101 years.
The CFL announced on Monday it won’t play a shortened 2020 season that would have seen Winnipeg as the hub city for all games. Instead, the league will focus on the 2021 campaign.
That will mean the B.C. Lions won’t have played a game in 18 months — if and when the pandemic allows play in 2021.
The last time there was no Grey
Cup, first held in 1909, was a fouryear lull from 1916-1919.
“There have been a lot of ups and downs over five months,” Rick LeLacheur, the president of the Lions, said on Monday during a virtual news conference.
“Many times I thought we wouldn’t make it and other times I thought we would. Particularly the last two weeks, I thought for sure everything was coming into place and we would be going to Winnipeg, but unfortunately, that didn’t come to pass.”
The nail in the coffin was the federal government’s refusal to give the league a $30 million interest-free loan. The league had originally asked for $150 million in assistance in April, then lowered that request to $44 million in June, before lowering it again to $30 million.
“We thought it was all coming together,” LeLacheur said. “It just seemed to come to, I don’t know, a big brick wall on Friday. I’m not sure what happened.”
The CFL said the federal government suggested the league pursue a commercial loan, which would be partly backed by Ottawa.
“That kind of arrangement would hamper our recovery more than bolster it,” CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie said. “On two occasions, in June and again at the beginning of August, the government reached out to us with new indications they might step up and help in a more meaningful way.
“But at the end of the day, the help we needed to play this year never materialized.”
The Lions’ average attendance at B.C. Place fell for the fifth straight year in 2019 to 17,803, compared with 28,011 in 2014. Attendance also suffered in the other two large markets: Toronto (12,493) and Montreal (17,574).
“We need a reset of the CFL,” LeLacheur said. “We know one of the challenges is in the three major centres.”
Overall league attendance fell in 2019 for the eighth consecutive year to 22,917 per game.
The Lions, who finished in last place in the West last season with a 5-13 record, will now focus on training camp next year in Kamloops.
If there’s a silver lining it’s the Lions have 10 months to put their house in order and come up with marketing plans to attract a younger demographic, said Aziz Rajwani, a lecturer at the UBC Sauder School of Business and CFL fan.
“Obviously, this is going to set them back a little bit,” Rajwani said. “One could argue the CFL has lost a generation, and this isn’t going to help. However, having said that, they have a year to figure it out.”
So despite having no games to showcase, it’s more important than ever for the Lions’ to engage with fans on social media, he said.
Three of the CFL’s nine teams are community owned, while others including the Lions have owners, such as David Braley, with deep pockets.
Kingsley Bailey at Vancouver Ticket and Tour Service said in a usual year the Lions might account for 15 per cent of the tickets he sells, and he’s not worried about the league surviving the pandemic.
“Of all the leagues out there, this is the only all-Canadian one,” he said. “It’s unique and I believe it will survive.”
The Canadian Football League will not attempt a 2020 season, finally coming around to a decision it has been trying to avoid for more than four months.
It was evident in April, when several CFL cities banned large gatherings through the summer, that there was no business case, for a modest league that draws the bulk of its revenues from ticket sales, to stage games without fans in the stands. Despite protracted negotiations with Ottawa and the provinces, nothing has changed in the months since.
That the CFL was only willing to stage a truncated season in a Winnipeg “bubble” if it could secure tens of millions of interest-free money from the Trudeau government merely underscores the point: a league that had shaky finances even in good economic times was in no shape to operate during a pandemic.
The big question now is: will it be able to operate beyond it?
Randy Ambrosie, the commissioner, said on Monday that the league’s governors were “absolutely committed” to playing next year, and he even touted on a media conference call how the CFL would stage its “biggest comeback season,” which is the kind of thing he says when he is in full salesman mode.
But, Ambrosie’s tendency toward bluster aside, there have to be serious doubts that nine CFL franchises will come out on the other side of the pandemic-induced pause.
When he went to Ottawa in May to make his case for up to $150 million in federal assistance for the league, a ploy that ended up being a tremendous overreach, Ambrosie told a parliamentary committee that its teams had collectively lost more than $20 million last season.
Given that the three community-owned teams in the Prairies generally report annual profits of around $1 to $2 million, that meant the other six teams must be losing tens of millions between them. Ottawa and Hamilton are model franchises playing in new, well-attended stadiums, which means either they still couldn’t turn a profit in good seasons, or the amount of money lost by the remaining four teams — Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto — is that much larger.
Either scenario is troubling. In making his pitch for pandemic relief, the commissioner laid bare that business isn’t just bad for the CFL in its biggest cities, it is disastrous.
This is a problem that had long been suspected, even if the CFL never quite wanted to admit it so publicly. The Toronto Argonauts and Montreal Alouettes each went through embarrassingly long sales processes that were mostly notable for all the titans of corporate Canada who were not kicking down their doors.
Attendance has been falling steadily in Vancouver, and B.C. Lions owner David Braley is said to be an interested seller, if only he could find someone to meet his price.
In their honest moments, those around the league admit that the gap between the love for the CFL in its small and medium-sized markets and the indifference shown it in the big cities is a major problem.
It’s why Ambrosie, long before the pandemic arrived, had thrown the league into a global-expansion strategy with a speculative long-term payoff of uncertain merit. If they couldn’t get any more money from markets in Toronto and Montreal, maybe they could get it from Mexico and Germany and Japan?
It has, to this corner, always seemed like a wildly optimistic idea, but Ambrosie was at it again on Monday, saying he planned to use the lost season to “accelerate our plans to become more international” and to return as “the biggest global football league in the world.” Somewhere, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell arches a single eyebrow.
Ambrosie also said he hoped to use the coming months to reach out to the parts of the country that haven’t embraced the CFL — new Canadians, and children of immigrants, and basically anyone who doesn’t have a multi-generational attachment to the three-down league — and sell them on how rewarding it can be to be a fan of a league that is uniquely Canadian.
Credit the man for hustle, but Ambrosie has been saying these things for years now and making new fans for a sport that literally is not playing any games seems like a challenge that would test even his salesmanship.
Growing the fan base aside, league management will in the short term have to deal with players who now find themselves without expected salaries and bonuses, some of whom will almost certainly seek to find work elsewhere. The leadership of the league’s players’ association made clear on Monday that it had thought CFL management should have gone ahead with a shortened season even without Ottawa’s help.
The Canadian Football League has survived franchise bankruptcies, and no shortage of shady owners, and a hilarious-in-retrospect U.S. expansion, and it has been propped up before by government assistance, and it has always managed to stick around.
But the coming November will mark the first time since the First World War that the Grey Cup will not be awarded. That week always serves as a beacon of CFL fandom, with the host city invaded by thousands of jersey-wearing fans who party as one in a riot of colours, watch the game on Sunday and then presumably go home and sleep it off for a week.
For a moment the CFL is the biggest game in town, wherever you are, and in the throes of the celebrations it feels like it probably did at a Grey Cup 50 years ago, before the CFL began to be squeezed by forces beyond its control.
It’s not a scene that will be repeated this year. The next Grey Cup is to take place in Hamilton in 2021. That’s the plan, anyway.