On Grey Cup eve, rise of MLS casts shadow over CFL's place in Toronto

It’s been said that a rising tide lifts all boats.

But there’s reason to wonder if the sudden rise of Major League Soccer’s fortunes in Canada might be punching a few holes in the boats of the Canadian Football League.

While soccer has many light years to go before it can come close to challenging the CFL on television, there are signs that at least in Canada’s biggest city it’s threatening to do some damage.

No doubt a few heads turned at CFL headquarters when the first leg of the MLS Eastern Conference final between the Montreal Impact and Toronto FC averaged 595,000 viewers on TSN and 429,000 on French-language RDS.

In addition, after Montreal’s 60,000-plus Olympic Stadium sold out in no time for that game, there were fewer than 1,000 tickets remaining for Wednesday’s rematch at BMO Field next Wednesday.

That’s the same BMO Field where the CFL is expecting a sellout for Sunday’s Grey Cup game, but was still almost 2,000 seats short as of Friday despite having months to flog the biggest football game in the country.

Unsold tickets aren’t unheard of at this stage of the CFL proceedings, but the entire story of the 104th Grey Cup has created concerns about the league’s viability in Toronto.

It’s been a major embarrassment, in fact, and has raised even more doubts about the league’s viability in Toronto.

After overpricing tickets out of the gate, the league and the host Toronto Argonauts were forced to discount them when sales stalled.

Then word leaked out that TSN was offering free tickets to its staff. An unlicensed pizza promotion this week that offered Grey Cup tickets in a package with pizza and wings for $29.99 only made things look worse, sending out the message that the league’s biggest ticket could be had for free.

But CFL commissioner Jeffrey Orridge is bullish on Toronto and points to strategic errors by the league and the Argos for the slow Grey Cup ticket sales.

“We own this collectively where the ticket prices were originally too high,” he said during Friday’s annual state-of-the-league address. “We made a correction. We listened to the fans, we understood the marketplace a little better, so we made that correction.

“The great thing is we’re expecting a full house Sunday.”

But a full house for a CFL match in Toronto is a rarity, usually reserved for Grey Cup games. While attendance was up 14 per cent in the Argos’ first season at BMO, the team averaged only 16,380 fans a game.

Toronto FC, on the other hand, saw an average of 26,583 go through the gates.

Orridge admits that is a concern and that the move from the Rogers Centre to BMO this season didn’t produce the desired results.

“It’s not where we want it to be,” he said. “Our expectations were very high, perhaps in some ways unrealistic. (The Argos were) a brand new club starting deep in their own end zone … they at least brought it out to the 35.”

Orridge noted that the number of season tickets doubled in 2016, showing that there is progress.

“A winning team would have helped,” he said of the last-place Argos, who went 5-13 and lost 10 of their last 11 games. “When you don’t have a winning team in a market it takes some of the air out of the balloon.”

Both Orridge and the Argo ownership believe they’ve got a winning formula with BMO.

“I guarantee you everything fan I’ve ever spoken to … they all told me they had an amazing experience, whether the team won or lost,” he said. Those fans will spread the word and attendance will rise in time, he added.

“It’s got all the elements for success,” he said. “But it’s going to take time.

“We know we’re doing the right things.”

While TFC is winning the battle at the turnstiles, there’s one area in which the Argos are comfortably ahead: television.

League ratings were up 3.5 per cent this year (553,000 on TSN and 130,000 on RDS) and the Argos played a role in that.

Ratings for their games rose 10 per cent with the key 18-49 age group experiencing a 52 per cent increase.

The MLS can only dream of those numbers.

While last week’s playoff game approached the CFL regular-season average (playoff football games have averaged more than a million), regular-season soccer ratings are so low that the teams and networks don’t release them.

At one point this year, TFC was averaging 38,000 a game, a figure that’s as close to zero as you can get. Only a handful of MLS games topped the 100,000 mark.

But with signs of life on that front, at least in the playoffs, the Argos and the CFL are going to have to work hard to keep their lead.