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How do you fix the Toronto Argonauts?
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Jun 27, 2022
113
By the second week of June 2001, only 18 months after Sherwood Schwarz had purchased the Toronto Argonauts, he was officially out of ideas. His management team embraced the only concept they could muster to draw fans back to the box office: A wet T-shirt contest.
Their plan, such as it was, focused on incorporating exotic dancers from a nearby adult establishment in a pre-game festival outside the stadium. Geoff Fardy, the vice-president of sales and marketing, saw the move as a necessity: “We want our men to be happy — we have marketed here for about 10 years to families, and look what it’s done.”
Within two years, the team was bankrupt.
Schwarz had tried other tactics and schemes, as would his successors. One year, the Argos tried to win local favour by hosting extravagant halftime shows, employing skateboarder Tony Hawk for one week, singer Amanda Marshall for another, and no less than Muhammad Ali for a third.
In 2006, the team signed suspended NFL running back Ricky Williams. Eventually, they would finally move out of Rogers Centre and into a more suitable home at BMO Field. They launched the first legal pre-game tailgate party in Ontario. They won the Grey Cup three times since the century turned.
What they had never managed to win, despite the marketing and the plans and the schemes, was what they had lost decades earlier, before the Blue Jays landed in Toronto. The Argos once drew crowds of 40,000 to their home games, with players who were household names and games covered both on TV and documented extensively through every local newspaper.
The erosion that sped through the Schwarz years — the league stepped in to stop the worst of his plans — has continued through five subsequent ownership changes. When the team launched its new season at home earlier this month, the Argos ran onto the field for an announced crowd of only 12,498.
It raised a question that Canadian Football League fans have been debating over pints for decades, but one that now feels alarming as the answer seems to slip further away: How do you fix the Argos?
The demographic core of the existing fanbase skews older. The city around the franchise has changed and evolved. The competition for attention has grown increasingly fierce, with the CFL fighting for a share of a market filled with entertainment options through spring, summer and fall.
“I was never embarrassed about the brand, even if it was a struggle,” said David Cynamon, a local businessman who helped save the club from bankruptcy in 2003. “Today, I’m somewhat embarrassed about the brand, and somewhat embarrassed about the league.
“And if they lose me, oh my god.”
Richard Peddie refused to become an owner of the Argos. The franchise landed on his doorstep twice during his long tenure as chief executive of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, the company he had helped build into a Canadian monolith, and he shooed it away both times.
He could not see the upside. The franchise value seemed frozen in time, worth just as much today as it was when Harry Ornest owned it in the late 1980s. When Peddie dug into the numbers, the team’s sale price always seemed to be somewhere around $5 million.
In contrast, MLSE bought a Major League Soccer expansion franchise for $10 million in 2006, with a push from Peddie, and saw its value climb to $250 million within a decade. If the value of a team was not going to rise, it was hard to make a viable business case to jump into the game.
“Someone’s got to step forward and say, ‘I’m prepared to lose millions of dollars,’” said Peddie. “Who is that generous philanthropist? Because that’s what it would take. It would be a sports philanthropist.”
Peddie chuckled: “We moved on, and we dodged a bullet.”
He retired from MLSE in 2011 and, seven years later, the company finally let the Argos inside. The team is now in a suite of sports properties headlined by the Maple Leafs and Raptors, along with Toronto FC, the Marlies of the American Hockey League and Raptors 905 of the NBA G League.
Founded in 1873, the Argos are by far the oldest property under the MLSE banner — formed just six years after Confederation — but they are also the most challenging.
“The problem has been the Argos, as a product, harken back to a different timeline in Canadiana,” said Michael Naraine, an assistant professor of sport management at Brock University. “And Toronto has diverged with other sports products that are more … perhaps global, and less Canadiana.”
That can manifest in ways that make the Argos look less attractive to potential sponsors. Adam Seaborn is head of partnerships for Playmaker Capital, a digital sports media company, and said companies tend not to place a premium on reaching an older audience.
A car company, he said, might think in 10-year cycles, and would spend money to connect with a 20-year-old sports fan who might be in the market for their first car. A bank would want to reach someone looking for their first credit card, or their first mortgage, and then have them connected for life.
“If the average fan of the Toronto Argonauts is already in their 50s, there’s no sense in spending marketing dollars to try and get them,” said Seaborn. “It’s just not a good return on investment to market against them.”
The Argonauts averaged 8,600 fans in seven regular-season home games in 2021. Over 21,000 watched their Eastern Final loss to Hamilton in December at BMO Field. (John E. Sokolowski / USA Today)
Ralph Lean is revered for his ability to spot a good investment. He has for decades been known as one of the city’s foremost powerbrokers, an expert political fundraiser who spent a career working as a Bay Street lawyer. He is also a loyal Argos fan.
Born in 1945 as the son of a pharmacist, he grew up in the city’s Roncesvalles neighbourhood, going to games with his father and eventually buying season tickets of his own. The 76-year-old had a gala that he could not miss earlier this month, so he listened to the fourth quarter of Toronto’s season-opener on the radio during his drive home.
“You’ve already got Ralph Lean,” he said. “You’ve got him locked down. You’re not losing him. You’d better find my kids and grandkids, and figure out what you can do.”
When the late David Braley owned the team, he approached Lean about recreating a booster club that had lifted the fortunes of the other CFL team he owned, the B.C. Lions. The idea was to invite a group of Toronto business leaders to watch the Argos, then use their network to expand the team’s reach.
In Vancouver, the club was called “The Waterboys.”
In Toronto, it was the “Double Blues.”
Former Ontario premier Mike Harris was a member, as was former Leafs president Brian Burke and soon-to-be Toronto mayor John Tory. Membership was the price of two season tickets, and members had the choice of spending a bit more to get pizza or a hot dog at home games. It was a cash bar.
Lean said it lasted until the team moved to BMO Field and raised the price of private suites.
“At the time, everyone thought, ‘it’s going to be the hottest thing in town,’” he said. “Well, they priced themselves out of the market, and we closed down.”
Lean has retired from his law practice, but he remains part of the city’s connective tissue. He is also an instructor at the Ted Rogers School of Management, at Toronto Metropolitan University, and he has an idea he thinks could still help the Argos.
He wondered if the curriculum could present the football team as a case study for MBA students, who would dig into the business metrics around the franchise and present their solutions for class credit. As a worst-case scenario, Lean said, MLSE would get a few business papers they could choose to discard.
“I can’t think of one of my students over the years,” he said, “who had ever gone to an Argo game.”
“What the CFL hasn’t done is, they haven’t kept up with the times,” said Cynamon, the former owner. “They haven’t improved the product.”
Cynamon helped rescue the team from bankruptcy with partner Howard Sokolowski in 2003, and they won a Grey Cup the very next season. They tried to build an Argos-friendly stadium at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, and they also tried to find a home at York University.
They signed Williams, who was under suspension for repeated infractions of the NFL’s substance rules, to generate a buzz in the city. Williams battled injuries and an offensive co-ordinator who opted for a pass-heavy offence, and then returned to the U.S. after the season.
Cynamon and Sokolowski sold the franchise three years after that.
“Frankly, they are so far behind in the world of entertainment, they have lost every generation,” he said of the CFL. “The next generation, they’ve already lost.”
What changes do they need to make?
“You could probably sit in a room with a bottle of wine and list 100 different little things,” he said with a chuckle. “But then you go to the big ones.”
Among the biggest, Cynamon argued, was a decline in the quality of the game. In an era when younger fans can access highlights from anywhere — including those in the NFL — a receiver dropping an easy pass in the open field diminishes the CFL’s potential reach. And expanding that reach, said Cynamon, should include an investigation beyond the league’s existing markets.
“It’s time to open the borders,” he said. “It’s time to join forces. It’s time to be a global league, let alone a North American league. Otherwise, we’re sheltering ourselves here in a bubble.”
It does not matter what kind of crowds the Argos used to draw, he said.
“Sam the Record Man used to be the top retailer in the city,” said Cynamon. “The world, and its rules, don’t care about traditions. They just move on. Everything moves on, and you’ve got to jump on that train at some point, or you just get passed — and that’s what’s happening to the CFL.”
By March 2005, four months after helping the Argos win the Grey Cup, eight players were sharing the same offseason conditioning routine: They were all working on the floor with Rona, the big-box home improvement chain.
Receiver Tony Miles was working in the electrical department. Linebacker Antonious Bonner landed in kitchen and bath. Bashir Levingston, the most electric kick returner in the game, was in the home décor section: “It gets me out of the house and I get to meet some good people.”
Lori Bursey loves the Argos because of stories like that. She has spent more than 40 years cheering for the team, and if BMO Field had a mayor on game day, she would win in a landslide. Bursey travels to road games, and she is a fixture during Grey Cup week.
“It’s grassroots, it’s affordable,” she said. “The players are your next-door neighbour. They’re not overpaid, egotistical athletes.”
The challenge in Toronto, she said, is that fans in the city, “equate great sports with how much players are paid, and all people ever talk about is how much Kawhi Leonard makes.”
Bursey also sees a positive in how many people paid to watch Toronto’s season-opener this month. The number might look small on paper, but not compared to the crowd the team drew to its final regular-season home game last fall: 6,247.
“It’s easy for people to sit back and criticize,” she said. “But if anybody had the right answer, my god, they’d be a millionaire. This market is so difficult.”
“It’s easy for people to sit back and criticize,” longtime fan Lori Bursey says of the Argonauts’ struggles. “But if anybody had the right answer, my god, they’d be a millionaire.” (John E. Sokolowski / USA Today)
Bill Manning has been learning about the market for both kinds of football in Toronto. He was already president of Toronto FC when the company placed the Argos in his lap four years ago, forcing him to catch up on more than a century of history.
“The Argos have stability right now,” he said. “And they really haven’t had that in a long, long time.”
At the start of the century, the Argos lived out of portable classrooms built at the foot of a field at the University of Toronto’s Erindale campus. When the buildings burned down during a fire on Christmas Eve in 2011, the team was left without a home.
For a while, the team would practice at Downsview Park, or an indoor soccer facility in Woodbridge, then pile into school buses for a ride to an empty Catholic high school in Etobicoke. The campus field was covered in goose feces, so the team would use concrete tennis courts for walk-through practices.
Today, Manning said the team practices at Lamport Stadium, in downtown Toronto, and takes a quick bus ride back to its facilities at BMO Field. The front office has been built into Coca-Cola Coliseum, which also houses the business operations for the Marlies.
Manning wanted Michael (Pinball) Clemons as his general manager, and he moved quickly when the generational fan favourite advocated for Ryan Dinwiddie to become head coach. Unlike teams around the league, Manning said the Argos did not lay anyone off, nor did they implement pay cuts during the pandemic-related shutdowns.
This year, he said the focus will be on four home games. The Argos will host two games at BMO Field during the Canadian National Exhibition later this summer, and game tickets will also secure entry into the fairgrounds.
There will also be a build-up for a home game against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, and a fan appreciation promotion with the home finale this fall. Manning said the hope is that the modest promotions draw a few more fans into the building, and that the product on the field will draw them back.
“Throwing money is not, in a market like this — as every owner previous to us has found — you can just sometimes throw money out the window,” he said.
He said the team has modest attendance growth expectations: “We’re not living in a world where we think the Argos are going to be selling out BMO Field, and getting these big, big crowds.”
In an interview earlier this month with the Globe and Mail, MLSE chairman Larry Tanenbaum voiced his concern about the direction the league was taking. He suggested divisions at the board level, where three of the league’s nine teams are controlled by community-owned groups, were holding back hopes of a rebound in its biggest markets: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.
“You see the Argos, you know, a 106-year-old league, and what value creation are these franchises trading at?” he asked. “You’ve got to look at that and say, ‘Is that success?’”
“Obviously, I’m very aware of Mr. Tanenbaum’s comments,” CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie said in an interview with The Athletic. “But also: Point me to a sports league in the world — point me to one — where all of the owners in all of the markets agree on all elements of that league’s particular strategic approach.”
So, then, how do you fix the Argos?
“I don’t think there’s a simple answer to what we want,” said Ambrosie. “And what we want, to be clear, is we want a really strong franchise in Toronto. We really believe there is an opportunity for a strong franchise here.”
The CFL missed an entire season due to COVID-19, with reports suggesting it lost around $80 million when players were kept off the field. It is only now emerging from heated labour negotiations with the CFL Players’ Association on a new collective bargaining agreement, which was ratified last month.
Ambrosie suggests the league is now in a better place to help markets such as Toronto.
“Toronto is a really different city than it was in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “And how do we reach this new community? And how do we have to understand this new population differently than the old one?”
The Argos have met with Tory, the mayor, who Ambrosie said has “identified very large groups of newer Canadians who are looking to do Canadian things.”
The Argos will celebrate their 150th anniversary next year. Plans are underway to celebrate. The team is also due to host another Grey Cup in the near future. Manning, the president, said the franchise remains on stable footing.
“We have a strong, mighty following,” he said. “It’s just smaller than the Leafs and the Jays and TFC and the Raptors. But they care just as much.”
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The link works for me when I click on it not sure why it’s not working for others .
Oh well I see Sheldon posted it .
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Among the biggest, Cynamon argued, was a decline in the quality of the game. In an era when younger fans can access highlights from anywhere — including those in the NFL — a receiver dropping an easy pass in the open field diminishes the CFL’s potential reach. And expanding that reach, said Cynamon, should include an investigation beyond the league’s existing markets.
“It’s time to open the borders,” he said. “It’s time to join forces. It’s time to be a global league, let alone a North American league. Otherwise, we’re sheltering ourselves here in a bubble.”
“Sam the Record Man used to be the top retailer in the city,” said Cynamon. “The world, and its rules, don’t care about traditions. They just move on. Everything moves on, and you’ve got to jump on that train at some point, or you just get passed — and that’s what’s happening to the CFL.”
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Agreed
Nail. Head.
It gets back to what someone said earlier is that there are two different camps in the CFL in regards to business strategy, one camp wants to sell history and traditions, 3 downs and the Ratio the other camps realizes that history and traditions, 3 downs and the Ratio don’t sell in MTL, GTA and Vancouver no matter how much people want to hope and wish that history and traditions will sell in those markets. Larry and his camps business goals and interests don’t align with the 3 community owned teams.
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What was , was. Let’s move forward and not live in the past. Tradition isn’t putting butts in the seats.
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I like the thought of keeping the game uniquely Canadian. Lose the ratio, and there won’t be any Canadians left in the Canadian Football League. And expanding to the US means losing the ratio. So Larry’s plans, IMO, will kill the league entirely.
But the league does need to make changes. For me, the only sacred cow is keeping Canadians in the game, which also means I can’t support US expansion.
Rip the playoff format apart, change the presentation and marketing, and make it more about sports entertainment. Tweak the rules where they need to be tweaked. Bring the game forward out of the 70s. We’ve evolved half a century since then. The game needs to join us.
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And also interesting C & S seems to think the the same way as Tannanbaum. A partnership with a league like the XFL would take the league outside of Canada’s borders.
It would be tough to lose 3 downs and other areas that make the Canadian game unique. There’s downside to uniqueness where the 3 down game isn’t played professionally anywhere else.
Curious to see what comes out of the league’s expansion effort
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Like any negotiation it is difficult to get everything that you want without giving something up. There are so many hills to die on for the “history and tradition” faction. 1) the Ratio 2) all teams in Canada 3) Three Downs 4) CFL field size.
And Larry’s crew would give up any and all of those to stay in the football business. To Larry’s Faction football is the important thing be it 3 or 4 downs, the catch being he is pretty sure that selling 3 down football in the GTA in a 9 team Canadian Domestic League is a lost cause which brings us to where we are and his faction wanting a cross border 4 down league with no ratio.
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Thank you Ms. Bursey for summing up the issue in Toronto that has been ignored by the league, but will need to be addressed if the Argos will ever emerge from the dark fringes of the Toronto sports scene.
The team, and the league at large would be wise to listen to her
Great idea, but the league’s moronic schedule that saw the Ticats playing the Argos 4 times in a month and a half killed any chance of this initiative working. 
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National Football League.
Owners figured out long, long ago it was in their best interest to ensure the viability of ALL of their markets by pooling resources and ensuring that their Green Bay franchise is just as strong financially as the one in New York.
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Also the NFL would change the game before you could spit and hear it hit the ground if they thought they were going to make more money. If the NFL thought they could make double the money playing 7 down football or 2 down football they would change tomorrow.
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Very true. The trick is figuring out how to bridge that gap without alienating the entire audience in the attempt. Hard task for sure and one I’m afraid the current administration is not ready to tackle
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I think why bothering saving a league that is no longer the Canadian Football league .....
They have known for decades the CFL is a philanthropy endeavour .
The whole idea of changing everything and thinking your preserving anything is weird logic .
There is nothing stopping a Canadian league to set up shop with US rules today and play before the CFL starts up .
So all this talk of MLSE makes no sense .
If you don't believe in the rules , Canadian content , then please take your money and take a hike ....... . If the only thing you enjoy in life is looking at numbers on a sheet then maybe you are not the type of owner that CFL needs or wants .
Enjoy it for what it is at the domestic level , further the development at the grass roots and create as many auxiliary revenue untapped , create sustainability and then modest team valuations will occur thru good stewardship of the brand .
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“Yeah, Larry!”
Unfortunately, most millionaires didn’t become so by throwing money around without expecting any return. Philanthropy is wonderful, but actually hard to find in the real world.
Wanting owners to invest in a known money loser, especially when it runs to millions per year, is a big ask.
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The XFL and the USFL are looking for “investors” and they think it’s a easy lay up
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