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Originally Posted by mistercorporate
The bottom line is that with a weak TV contract, minimal promotion on the networks and a very new product, TFC are able to sell out stadiums week after week and sell millions of dollars in merchandise. They would be quite profitable too but for their recent addition of $100 million in player contracts. Once they finish expanding their stadium capacity in a year (the stadium roof will take another year to complete after that), they'll be profitable again. No CFL team comes close to them in terms of fan support to finance a $30 million and growing annual payroll. Once the new TV money kicks in and the salary cap increases (expected to double this year) with an additional designated player slot, you can fully expect the new stadium to sell out requiring a further expansion. This is not the mark of a team or league without massive support.
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It's not hard to see the link between the longer TFC season and increased payroll. More games = more money. If the CFL played 25-odd home games per team (which you obviously cannot do in pro football because of the physical toll that the game takes), then it would have roughly the same payroll as MLS, minus a few million dollars. (Assuming 20,000 fans at an average price of $50 a pop = $1,000,000 gate per game). It is not as though the MLS payroll is larger than the CFL's by orders of magnitude like the NBA's, for instance. MLS has what the CFL payroll would be if the CFL played a MLS-length season.
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I went for a walk around town yesterday evening and saw 3 different people with TFC gear and a dozen with Blue Jays gear, all within a couple hours. I have yet to see someone Argos gear in this city after 20+ years of living here. Please continue to minimize the opinions of Torontonians who insist that there's hardly anyone here who follows or watches the Argos, the Jays, Leafs and TFC are common water cooler talk, the Argos are nowhere to be seen but in these interpretations of media stats from CFL fanboys on this message board...
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Then how do you explain away the numbers? When, for example, an Argos game gets 820,000 viewers but a TFC game gets 2.7% of that viewership... are you telling us that there are hundreds of thousands of people watching online? Or that there are half a million people in Saskatchewan watching Argo games? Neither of those really seem plausible.