You've made some good points, Cromartie, but there's something you said at the start I want to come back to.cromartie wrote:Wrong. Try St. Louis, where the Rams are an afterthought. Or Los Angeles, back when they had either the Raiders or the Rams. Or Miami. Or Atlanta pre Michael Vick. Or Indianapolis pre-Peyton Manning. Or Tampa Bay now. Or Miami when a good Heat team overlaps with a bad Dolphins team. Or San Diego just about any time, brah.Where else is there a city where the matter of a football team winning or losing isn't a matter of concern for most of the city's sports fans.
Nowhere, that's where. Except here.
There are a lot of misconceptions about sports markets and their relative elasticity. Since I've had my fair share of flight delays, I've given this a lot of thought. What I've come up with is that you can divide North American sports markets into essentially four types:
1) College Towns. These are markets where a strong university presence dictates that one college sport, usually football, assumes the dominant financial, marketing and media coverage base. For the most part, there is no overlap between a professional team and a college team in these markets. Where there is, however, college sports dominates. Columbus, OH is probably the primary example of this. Ohio State football rules coverage there, and the Blue Jackets suffocate beneath it and Ohio State in general. Jacksonville, FL because it resides in SEC country, could be considered a town where SEC football ranks nominally above the NFL. (There's a reason that Florida and Georgia play in Jacksonville every year).
2) Sports Ambivalent Towns. These towns have no dominant sports franchise. They tend to consist of transient populations or populations without a cultural tradition of community centered professional sports. Can you make a profit there? Usually, but television ratings will be so/so, franchise finances are such that you have to put some effort in to break even, and a great deal of effort to get to profitability. The idea that the identity of a town is centered around professional sports is really not part of the local fabric. These towns tend to be concentrated where you think and include: Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Las Vegas, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego
3) The One Sport Town. This comprises the majority of sports markets in North America. In these markets, one team in one sport can generally throw open the doors and generate revenue hand over fist regardless of how good they do. Other teams can usually get by in these markets as well, however they need to do significant community outreach and field a winning product in order to generate substantially profitable revenue. These markets include: Cleveland (Browns), St. Louis (Cardinals), Dallas (Cowboys), Los Angeles (Lakers), Pittsburgh (Steelers), Cincinnati (Bengals), Indianapolis (Colts), New Orleans (Saints), Houston (Texans), Buffalo (Bills), San Antonio/Salt Lake City/Oklahoma City (NBA), Portland (Timbers), Nashville (Titans), Milwaukee (Brewers), Kansas City (Chiefs), Green Bay (Packers) .
Every Canadian market falls into this category. For all of these markets, with the exception of Regina, the NHL team is the center of the market, and ancillary teams have to compete for the remaining pool of disposable income through a combination of marketing, smart spending/investment, a competitive on field product and strong and constant community outreach.
4) Durable Markets. Either through geographic isolation, a tradition of professional sports as the centerpiece of cultural identity or sheer numbers, these markets support every professional sporting endavor to a sustainable break even point, provided the franchise makes a reasonable effort. These markets include New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Phoenix, Seattle and San Francisco/San Jose
There is an expectation that Toronto should fall into category #4. It does not, and never will. Toronto has the deeply engrained cultural tradition of hockey among the majority of the hardcore sports fans, and those people will invest their time and money in the Leafs come hell or high water. That's it, that's the list. Certainly the other teams can market themselves as "cool" which happens when they play well enough or get a dynamic enough of a personality to generate a buzz or if they open a new stadium. But that buzz is not sustainable. You have other barriers to generating and sustaining interest in sports properties in Toronto that aren't unlike Los Angeles; geographic sprawl, a wide range of things to spend your disposable income on beyond just professional sports, and a lack of cultural root in baseball, football, basketball or soccer. (Or, in the case of the Argos, as with Montreal, a deep set of roots that rotted and died out entirely in from 1960-1990).
Toronto is not a football town. NFL or CFL. It is not a baseball town. It is not a basketball town. It is not a soccer town. It is a hockey town, period. Full stop. Stop expecting it to be anything else. Montreal isn't either. It is a town whose relationship with those sports is akin to Cleveland's with basketball. They'll show up and invest when the product on offer has sufficient marketing buzz and is top tier...and the Browns (or in this case, the Leafs) aren't playing. It is what it is, and that's all it's going to be. Can you do things to help? Sure, and Montreal shows a very clear path to a sustainable market presence. But don't pretend the Argos will ever own the town or be the talk of the town, because they won't. In that sense, Naylor's right.
it's also what makes Toronto a $2 billion mistake as it relates to the NFL. GTA residents will treat an NFL team like Canadians treat American entries in any product line into the market: high sampling, low to sustainable but lower than projected retention. Fortunately, the NFL understands that they can keep the Bills in Buffalo and it will still draw from the GTA under what Richard Florida calls the Torbuffchestercuse regional approach and generate as much, if not more, revenue than yanking the team from that market and putting it in Toronto.
But Naylor doesn't really see the big picture. Most of us don't. What happened in the early 1990s is that marketers got a lot more savvy to the division of disposable income. You aren't just competing against other professional sports teams anymore. You're competing against an ever large pool of opportunities to get disposable income, many of which come with less overhead and larger margins than professional sports. As such, expectations of sports people tend to be unrealistic. Toronto is frustrating, but it isn't unique.
Maybe those markets don't support their NFL teams as well as they could. But unless I'm mistaken, I don't think sports fans in these cities fawn over football teams in other markets. When they root for a football team (or whatever sport), I would think they generally root for their own. Not someone else's. That's one of Naylor's main points. And that's The Problem With Toronto. Not getting strong support for a team in your area is one thing. That's not uncommon as you state. But to support a team from another area at the expense of your own is quite another. I think Toronto is unique in this regard.Wrong. Try St. Louis, where the Rams are an afterthought. Or Los Angeles, back when they had either the Raiders or the Rams. Or Miami. Or Atlanta pre Michael Vick. Or Indianapolis pre-Peyton Manning. Or Tampa Bay now. Or Miami when a good Heat team overlaps with a bad Dolphins team. Or San Diego just about any time, brah.
One other thing you said I would disagree with (somewhat facetiously), I would say Toronto is NOT a hockey town. It's a Leafs town. Several AHL and OHL teams that have come and gone out of the GTA in the last couple generations. None of them have won over the locals the way the Leafs have. Also, I'm not sure I would quite include Phoenix as a "durable" market what with the Coyotes. Maybe it does fit that bill for their MLB/NBA/NFL teams but I don't know about the NHL. Maybe things will stabilise with the new ownership and their Arizona rebranding, so I'll rank it incomplete for now.
) but it did make me laugh you'd have an article about all the big events (including this event called the Grey Cup 
) and have a picture of a guy showcasing all the Seahawk tickets he's got for sale on your front page.....
