CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie delivers his state-of-the-league address at the Hamilton Convention Centre in Hamilton, Ont., on Dec. 10.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Canadian Press
Eighteen months after warning he might need up to $150-million in federal funds to ensure the survival of his league in the face of COVID-19 – but failing to secure any – CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie offered a sharply rosier assessment on Friday morning, declaring that a global partnership deal he struck this week, along with other changes to business operations that are in the works, would bring stability to the perennially besieged league.
“We used the [COVID-19] crisis to really re-examine how we approach the business of the game,” Ambrosie declared. “We found a way to restructure our business in a way that’s going to give us a much stronger financial foundation.”
He suggested the league is newly open to change and bold ideas, at one point evoking Apple Inc.’s radical approach to determining its purpose in the world, which is at the heart of every product and service it offers.
Among Ambrosie’s planned changes is the league’s first revenue-sharing agreement in more than three decades, under which the more successful franchises – such as the community-owned Saskatchewan Roughriders, Edmonton Elks and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers – subsidize money-losers owned by wealthy individuals or multibillion-dollar corporations, such as Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment’s Toronto Argonauts.
Ambrosie’s splashiest announcement was that the CFL had signed a long-term deal, believed to be 10 years, with Genius Sports, a London-based data and technology company, which he pledged would be “transformational” in helping the league increase engagement with existing fans and find potential new fans around the world. Genius will become a minority equity investor in CFL Ventures, a new division the league has created to exploit its commercial holdings. Most of the company’s contribution will be in technology sharing.
Genius has partnerships with hundreds of sports leagues around the world, providing data from the playing field to betting operators to enable real-time wagering. In a news release, Genius announced it would “have the exclusive rights to commercialize the CFL’s official data worldwide and video content with sports books in international markets, replicating the global distribution and success of its official betting products of the EPL and NFL, among others.” It can also target sports fans with offers of tickets, merchandise, or other content based on their online behaviour.
“This is for us the opportunity we’ve been looking for, a catalyst to drive our business in a new and positive direction,” Ambrosie said. “It will help us to unlock the doors of fan engagement in a way that we couldn’t have dreamt up on our own.”
He made the comments during his annual state-of-the-league address and news conference, which traditionally kicks off Grey Cup weekend.
The Blue Bombers will face off against the hometown Hamilton Tiger-Cats at Tim Hortons Field on Sunday evening for the 108th Grey Cup, a rematch of the previous CFL championship, which the Bombers won in November, 2019.
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Friday’s address was the first time Ambrosie had faced the assembled Canadian football press in person since that Grey Cup, after last year’s CFL season was cancelled in August, 2020 when the league determined it could not safely hold even an abbreviated season in a bubble.
He began on a reflective note, telling the reporters, “We’ve missed you,” before quickly adding: “not all the time, but we’ve missed you, we’ve missed having the interactions.”
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By the end of the encounter, he may have missed them less, as they probed him for specifics: about the Genius Sports deal; his aborted talks last spring and summer with the upstart XFL football league, which upset many traditional fans; how he intends to improve the woeful attendance figures for Argonaut home games; and how realistic it is for the CFL, which has an older and less diverse fan base than other pro leagues, to successfully court new and younger Canadians.
Asked what the league might consider doing to improve the quality of play – scoring has been trending downward, and observers have suggested this season was the least entertaining in many years – Ambrosie pointed to the deal with Genius Sports as evidence of “a league that is ready to change, a league that is ready to ask the right questions.
“We have to talk to our fans, we have to understand more, like the way Apple approaches its business: ‘Why’ as opposed to ‘What,’” he said, referring to business gurus’ observations that the iPhone company is driven by a deep purpose (”Why”) rather than a mere desire to create cool products (”What”).
“‘Why’ is the beginning of a whole other conversation,” Ambrosie said. “I think this league is ready to do what’s necessary to grow in business, to live up to our full potential.”
Still, he tempered hopes for those who think the CFL might become a money-spinner in the near future. “We’ve created a philosophy that all teams – if they do most of the right things – all teams can and should be able to break even,” he said. “We’re going to hold each other accountable for that standard. And that’s exciting.”
One of the most contentious of the changes may be the move next season to incorporate some form of gate equalization, or revenue sharing. Asked how fans who own the Roughriders might feel about sending money to the deep-pocketed owners of the Argos, Ambrosie praised the league’s nine governors, who represent the owners of the nine clubs.
“This isn’t a question of one team giving to another. It’s not a question of somebody sacrificing something for somebody else. This was a question of how do we win together? That was the way the governors, to their infinite credit, approached the issue,” he said. “This league’s history has always seen us have a team or two struggle, and to some degree we’ve left them to struggle on their own, and this is a decision that those days are over.”
“I think our fans are going to welcome this.”