So back at the beginning of the month, the Buffalo Bills announced they had reached a deal to play some games in Toronto. The deal was for a total of eight games, three preseason and five regular season, to be played starting this year through 2012, at the building formerly known as SkyDome, the Rogers Center. This caused some transborder anguish.
Buffalo Bills fans have been haunted by the grumblings that the Bills might move to Toronto for a while now. Even down here in Washington, DC I hear this. Since Jim Kelly’s arrival the Bills have done well attendance wise, but team management just grouses about western New York’s population not growing and its economy struggling. I have no idea if the latter is true, but it seems probable. Then the bridge talk begins about how running a NFL team is ever expensive and the need to think out of the box to new sources of revenue, like that huge, rich city up the QEW.
The Bills’ Canadian partners are Rogers Communications, which owns the Blue Jays among others things and Maple Leaf Sports, which owns the Maple Leafs and Raptors. The football team that currently plays at the Rogers Center, the CFL’s Argonauts, gets a small cut in the deal, with their season ticket holders getting in the priority pool for Bills game tickets. Bills fans are also in said pool.
I don’t know what Canadian football fan opinion is, but I have better things to do than troll around fan boards and other football blogs to gauge this. I’d guess hostile, as the hardcore CFL fans are often flinty about the NFL and rather a lot of Canadians seem to regard Toronto as a foreign city, sort of the way rather a lot of Americans feel about New York. The CFL commissioner issued a neutral public statement on the matter while noting that the CFL and NFL were working on an agreement between the two leagues. The Argonauts are obviously on board, but the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, who are actually closer to Buffalo, have opted out of letting their season ticket holders in the priority pool, pending the two leagues reaching an agreement.
I’ve always been hostile to regular season overseas games by North American sports leagues, not so much for the games themselves, but because it leads to boring crazy talk about “eventually setting up eight NFL teams in Indonesia” as part of growing revenues in a globalized marketplace. The NFL, NBA and MLB do this once a year mostly to pump up their overseas merchandise and TV revenues, but also to give off an aura of international importance and forward thinking. It wouldn’t do for a league executive to say “We hope to sell more t-shirts and jerseys, building up to a game that would be an occasional local novelty. There isn’t sustained interest in our sport here (or there’s a local version of it) but there are enough people here with money who want a cool-looking shirt to wear. Like those people in U.S. wearing EPL or Bundesliga jerseys.” Always, there needs to be a throw away line regarding setting up a local division of the league in whatever market is being emphasized (recently it’s been Ma and Pa Wong’s Old Country, China) that will compete against the parent league. Only once in many years of buzzing about overseas marketing have I heard a sports talking head concede that this was part of a long, long term plan that may never result in, say a true baseball World Series with the New York Yankees playing the Nippon-Ham Fighters.
I shouldn’t care, it’s not my money that will be spent on marketing these endeavors and I inevitably turn the radio or TV off when the discussion comes about. The NFL isn’t a public entity and most football journalists aren’t going to use their resources to investigate, but I wonder if they really make money on the various exhibition and regular season games played in Mexico, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and Japan? I know NFL Europe was heavily dependent on papering the events with free tickets to American military personnel in Germany. They’re no longer with us.
As for this, I really like the CFL and want to see them continue. The CFL regular season has a partial overlap with the NFL season and I doubt the Argos and Bills could co-exist in Toronto. As much as I like the idea politically and philosophically, it’s probably impossible for people in Buffalo to form some kind of public-trust that will run the team and keep them there like the Packers in Green Bay, or the Blue Bombers in Winnipeg. I find myself in the odd position of hoping the games fail.