The Buffalo Bills are playing the second in their series of five “home” games in Toronto tonight, which means it’s time for the New York Times to dust off the perennial story about how losing a team is bad for local businesses. Writes Times reporter Ken Belson:
There is no accurate tally of the money spent in the days leading up to Bills home games, but one thing is clear. The team’s decision to play eight home games in Toronto over five years hurts an array of local businesses.
“It stinks,” said Amy Morgan, the owner of Tailgaters Bar & Grill, which makes about 70 percent of its monthly sales on game days, when 10 workers are employed. “They’re taking revenue away.”
Belson goes on to note the number of lost hotel room rentals to visiting teams, and the “thousands” of out-of-town visitors (ironically, many of them from Toronto) that normally come to Buffalo on game days. He makes no mention, though, of the fact that presumably most local Bills fans are still spending their money in town this weekend — though it’s more likely dispersed at sports bars and restaurants throughout the city rather than in the few stadium-side businesses Belson spoke to. But then, you really can’t expect much economic rigor from an article with lines like: “Based on huge piles of empty cans strewn across parking lots near the stadium, beer sales also take a hit when the Buffalo area loses a game.”
Meanwhile, the Buffalo News reports on what should be a bigger story: Despite assumptions that Toronto is a burgeoning market that could ultimately lure the Bills to relocate, there are plenty of cheap tickets still available for tonight’s game, and one Canadian columnist has called it “a sports marketing disaster of epic proportions.” Whether this is a function of Canadian dispassion for the NFL or the gimmicky nature of hosting one Bills game a year — Toronto Sun columnist Ken Fidlin called it “like renting somebody else’s kids just so you can enjoy Christmas morning” — isn’t entirely clear, but it’d seem a topic more worthy of the Paper of Record’s time than counting beer cans.
There are many problems with this Bills series in Toronto but one is that football isn’t hockey and we are so inundated with hockey culture here that anything else, if people are asked to pay fairly big bucks for tickets for a regular season game, aren’t going to work. Here in Canada, unfortunately I might add, we don’t have a culture of Friday night high school games and Saturday college games that large numbers of people get into and our youth football programs are paltry compared with the US. Hockey is a different matter of course.
There are a few people at Rogers Corp that are huge NFL fans that thought they could make a big buck off the series like Ralph Wilson is doing from them and Rogers is losing millions of millions of dollars. I think it’s time for Ralph Wilson to pull the plug on this series for the sake of his team and their fans. I mean, does he really need the money that bad to take a home game away from his very own team? That’s just plain ugly any way you cut it.
That being said, I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions based on tickets being cheaper on the internet the day of the game. That happens everywhere (the online equivalent of a scalper halving his prices the minute after kickoff), and if the cheapest ticket is $40, that’s much more expensive than they would have been in the Detroits, Jacksonvilles, and Oaklands of the NFL. The fact that they sold out even a smaller stadium where the cheapest ticket is $99 says something.
I have to disagree with Brian (above). As somebody who went to the game last night (I was given free tickets as was, it seemed, everyone else around me), the NFL’s attempt to move into Toronto is an unmitigated disaster. There’s a lot to read into what went on there.
However, unlike Mike (two above), I don’t simply blame it on the Canadian hockey obsession — (historically, after-all, Canadian football pre-dates the American variety and record numbers of Canadians witnessed the 100 year anniversary of the Grey Cup just last Sunday). It’s complicated, but put simply the NFL’s attempt to woo Toronto is seen by many football fans in these parts as a cultural intrusion that will destroy a venerable national institution (the CFL). So while I, like many other Canadian football fans may enjoy both brands of football (I go to one game in Buffalo almost every year) — I enjoy them as distinct cultural entities. The NFL is American and belongs in America. The Bills are American and belong in Buffalo. The Argos are Canadian and belong in Toronto. And although I couldn’t resist the freebie, I wouldn’t give Rogers or Wilson one red penny to help them kill these institutions.