I've had enough of that sinkhole in our country Toronto.... They do not deserve another Grey Cup. Do not give an economic boost to that city. They do not deserve it.
They do not deserve the oldest pro franchise in north america and all the success they have had.
And they do not deserve to be apart of the great CFL with all the history and tradition and what it stands for......
i've had enough, no more!! I will not back them no longer or support that franchise until it leaves that sinkhole city.
time to move the team to Kitchener-Waterloo, Oshawa, or even outside of the province (halifax, quebec city, okanagan valley - kamloops/penticton,etc
Time to get serious with this.
Toronto is out - the corporate people in that city are frauds/crooks. The people are walking zombies thinking they are in new york city.
Canadian corporate companies will support this league without a team in toronto it's getting too big for them not to. Even a t.v. contract is too low. TSN should be paying double what they are.
And it will get there one day with/without a team in the sinkhole city we call Toronto.
Ditto, apparently less than 10,000 tonight after beating Regina, PATHETIC :oops:
the Argos next home game is on a Tuesday against Winnipeg, could be an all time low ! they should play it at Varsity, it would be a sell out !
Things can - and hopefully will - change at BMO with MLSE ownership - but until then if somebody was to substitute the word 'want' for 'deserve' in the title of this thread - they would have a strong argument on their side - for the moment at least.
This 'deserve' post is rather silly because it has everything backwards. It is not up to a city or people in a city to convince the CFL or the Argos that the city and fans deserve the team and league. It is up to the team and league to show they are worthy of support from people in that city by providing them a good fun experience so that people feel they get good entertainment value for their hard earned money and want to come back.
The Argos and the CFL are the product that have to create a demand for their product in Canada's biggest city, just like other sports teams, concert promoters, festival promoters, next weekend Indy Race promoters, in weeks after that Rogers Cup tennis, dance clubs, party promoters, the CNE, Canada's Wonderland etc etc. Every week there is so much going on it that city people have hundreds of choices how to spend their leisure money - more options than anywhere else in Canada - and the Argos under current management playing in the venue they play in - are doing a poor job at getting themselves noticed in all that clutter and are not providing an experience people want enough to buy tickets regularly.
this has to be one of the stupidest comments ever. The league and the team has to prove? get a grip of reality buddy.... the CFL and the Argos for the last 100 years have done nothing but give that city championships and hell of a lot of fun. It's not so much the city as the structure and buildings that are the problems. It's the people..... most of the people who live in Toronto live in a glass house that fills up their ego. Most of our country's problems come from Toronto. With immigration(have you been to the airport?), with the illegals, with the crime, with the crooks that run the corporate offices, and the frauds who run illegal cartels, and the crapholes who run company's for the sake of canadians to destroy it's roots ala rogers!!!
Real Canadians live out west. (sorry maritimes but you are in the east and deserve better than being next to Quebec and Ontario.... I feel bad for Hamilton also! To be stuck next to that sinkhole.
Toronto will forever be the garbage capital of Canada. It's so sad it will continue as is and the people will never truly experience what Canada is really about. Which is good cause what you do not want are people from Toronto moving into your backyard.
The Argonauts deserve better. Not the other way around.
MOVE THE ARGOS. MOVE THE ARGOS. MOVE THE ARGOS. MOVE THE ARGOS
Well if you are a typical 'Real; Canadian - whatever that may be - I'm glad you are out west and not here in Southern Ontario where we are just 'regular' Canadians - who live in the GTHA where we buy tickets for and go to games that provide an entertaining fun atmosphere. If the experience is lacking a fun atmosphere - we stop buying tickets.
Jays under Interbrew ownership - terrible atmosphere and attendance plummeted. Rogers took over and after a few years of figuring out what worked they started doing things that attracted a younger crowd and now Jays games are fun again with a crowd probably on average 10-15 years younger than what they were attracting 10 years ago. Lots of activities and deals for families. Same thing happened in Hamilton for the Cats with dwindling attendance until Bob Young made the in stadium experience and going to Cats game fun again.
Argos have a bunch of successful teams at the gate in their very city - but have failed to succeed the way the others have. That is a failure of ownership - it is not a failure of the fans.
You probably would have fit right in on the Board of Nortel and Blackberry - sit on their laurels because they deserve to have their products bought only to get left in the dust by more aggressive organizations who understood the new marketplace better.
If you think anywhere the CFL is going to thrive with the attitude of 'we deserve it' rather than taking the approach that we need to earn that support every single day - you are nuts.
To be fair the team doesn't have an owner, it has a guy willing for now to keep the team alive. This isn't a team that really markets itself as a viable team to watch. In a market like T.O you have to do more than win games, you also have to market to the city, and the Argos are weak at it. Toronto is a necessary market, I hope an owner can be found soon, the crowds remind me of Montreal in the 80's, there's a generation of fans lost in that city, but like Montreal change is good and getting a smaller stadium and more intimate crowd will help huge.
Toronto is not even part of Canada...they don't even pronounce Canada correctly. They pronounce it like Americans do.... Caanada
same as Hamilton is pronounced Haamilton..It's sad really
Yes, please go ahead and paint a city of 5 million people with the same brush, from the basement of whatever podunk town you live in. And of course, the CFL would certainly be healthier without a franchise in Canada's largest city. Yes, that would benefit all of us.
I don't agree with the original post and would hate for Toronto to lose its football team but your being a revisionist. Everything has been tried in Toronto. The last owners were good owners, Schwartz before them tried to market the hell out of that team. They've had some great seasons on the field as well.
This reminds me of the situation with the Als in Montreal in the 80's. There simply is very little interest in Toronto for football. The situation might be even worse considering there is more competition for sports entertainment dollars than there was in Montreal at the time.
The CFL is in a pickle. They don't want to leave the Toronto market vacant and they don't want to invest in the team either. A hiatus may be the only solution. Right now they are trying to pawn their problem off to MLSE who is part of the group who's been trying to kill the Argos for years and currently bidding for the Bills which the CFL has admitted that a relocation of the Bills to Toronto would end the Argos anyway.
Toronto will be a work in progress until the league is able to hand out million dollar contracts. That may be 15 years down the way, as perceived markable players will do more for attendance.
The fans need to shoulder a big portion of the blame . How much marketing should one need to go watch a team that has been around for a 100 years and have won Grey Cups . Especially the 100th and the Flutie years . That should have be MORE than enough to have built a solid following . The the dome, traffic, lack of someday telling you through media it's fun and you should go to Argo games are all soft excuses .
No. You clearly don’t understand the challenges marketing the CFL in a major urban metropolis with many other forms of entertainment and many different sports to choose from. Toronto is not like Winnipeg.
BINGO! People have more choices how to spend their leisure time and marketers and organizations are aggressively going after people each and every day through various methods. They tweak their marketing all the time to try to catch the attention of the market - and they have to or you fail in that big city marketplace. What you did four years ago doesn't matter - heck in some cases what you were trying to sell me four weeks ago doesn't matter because in the meantime something else has caught my eye and I'm going to give that a try - and if I have fun at that other thing - you are going to have to come up with something to make me want to come back to see you again.
The only team in Toronto that can get away with not marketing because they could sell tickets here are the Leafs - but even them their marketing machine never ends. They sponsor events and have team members doing appearances all over year round, their social media never takes a break just to be sure they don't slip and lose that lock they have on fans. All the other teams have to work much harder - and they do - and it works. And undoubtedly a huge part of that is the media connections that gets their message out. But even that is not a guarantee of success - just look at the Bills in Toronto Series.
So yes the Argos are at a disadvantage - not being part of a media company - so they need to work twice as hard and be creative - but they don't and they are not - and we all see the result. Time for one of the successful sports organizations to give it a go at BMO. Right now that is the only apparent lifeline for the CFL and the Argos in that city.
last night didn't convince anyone that they should continue to attend argo's game or start going.
i brought two newbies to the game and we were rewarded with an embarrassing effort by the team and a star performance by the refs - they are the stars, are they not?
i doubt i'll be able to convince anyone to attend another argos game again, as it seems whenever i bring a newbie, milanovich gives his team the night off.
Great post. I agree. Unless you've lived in Toronto for an extended period of time, it can be hard to grasp just how many options are available for the average person/family, especially in the summertime. If you've lived all your life in a small town or even a small Canadian city, your perspective on big-city markets might be a bit parochial.
Furthermore, the Argos are always at a disadvantage because the CFL is seen as a second-rate league and Torontonians, by and large, want to be associated with "world-class" sports -- MLB, NBA, NHL.
People are always chastising Toronto or Montreal for not being good sports cities. But really, what point does it serve to complain? Griping about how things "should" be isn't going to do squat. Like it or not, we have the football markets that we have. I'd love to see the Als selling out 30,000k stadia every game with a huge profile in the city. But in Montreal, everything is a distant second to the Habs in terms of sports. And that's not even counting the 100 other ways you can spend your limited leisure dollars in the summer. So respect the market you have and look for ways to be sustainable in that market -- not the fantasy city that only exists in your head.
Don't understand the Toronto hate on this board, its a community that lost its relationship with the football team, the attendance is a part of a 30 year disassociation wih the CFL. Toronto is just as Canadian as the smallest town in Saskatchewan, theres no exact way to be us, we just are. Vancouverites arent Calgarians, just like Edmontonians arent Montrealers but we are all Canadian. Its a huge country with different ways of being who we are, dissing a community that doesnt support its football team financially isn't every Torontoians fault, its up to the Argo community to push reasons to go to the game. That starts with a legit ownership group, Brailey is just holding the team afloat until a deal is done. Football is not a sport that gets huge attendance, CFL is a sport that on average gets about between 22,000 and 25,000 support anything more is gravy. To get Toronto to that level will take work, work thats not really being done. So instead of dumping a turd all over a great beautiful city the CFL should be doing its part by making going to see the Argos worth paying the price of a ticket. Im just happy there are Canadians willing to lose money to keep teams like the Argos and TiCats alive.
