Would Halifax support pro football?
FRANCIS CAMPBELL The Chronicle Herald January 1, 2018
‘We feel that we could actually support a stadium that holds upwards of 30,000’
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part four of a series on the latest attempt to bring a CFL team to Halifax.
PART 1: CFL in Halifax: A gamble with lots of field to cover
PART 2: Stadium talks dominates CFL expansion discussion
PART 3: Halifax CFL franchise would make football a coast-to-coast sports, says commissioner
PART 5: Roughriders show that CFL fan support can be province-wide
PART 6: Retired CFL pros want to see Halifax team
PART 7: Could a public-private partnership secure a CFL stadium?
PART 8: Stadium will make or break Halifax’s CFL bid
That is the challenge facing the business group that wants to bring the Canadian Football League to Halifax. If they construct a stadium to house their field of CFL dreams, will the fans come in numbers large enough to make it viable?
Anthony LeBlanc, one of three men who front the Maritime Football Ltd., ownership group, said the bid to bring an expansion team to the Atlantic region is in its first phase, the stage of trying to determine “what a conditional franchise would look like and allow us to really go out and gauge the market and see what the support is going to be like.”
“That’s very critical but very common,” said LeBlanc, a longtime executive with Research in Motion and the former president and chief executive of the Arizona Coyotes of the National Hockey League. “Let them go out and gauge the interest. The league wants to see it, the city, the province and, quite frankly, economic investors want to ensure that our expectations are real.”
LeBlanc said the ownership group hired Don Mills and his Corporate Research Associates to do some detailed polling about fan support for a CFL expansion team.
“The results that came back were really positive, that people want to go to a game” LeBlanc said. “He put some pretty strong factors in (the survey questions) with regards to the results and ensuring that it wasn’t over-inflated, and the numbers were really, really positive. He only looked in a 100-mile radius. We feel that we could actually support a stadium that holds upwards of 30,000.”
A larger audience
The CRA polling extended for only 160 kilometres from the Halifax area, a survey that would reach respondents as far afield as Middleton, Liverpool, New Glasgow, Oxford, Economy and Ecum Secum.
Add another 100 kilometres to the catchment radius and you can reach fans from Moncton, a few more kilometres and you are into the heart of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
Greg Turner, a Moncton city councillor who was instrumental in bringing major junior hockey to Moncton, said his city has a strong relationship with the CFL. The first regular-season game ever played in the Atlantic region was held on Sept. 26, 2010, at the 10,000-seat Moncton Stadium, a $17-million venue that had opened earlier that year to host the world junior athletics championships. The stadium sold out for the neutral-site game between the Edmonton Eskimos and Toronto Argonauts, a capacity crowd that filled about 10,000 additional temporary seats.
The following year, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Montreal Alouettes played another regular-season game in Moncton. Those games followed league exhibition tilts at Saint John, N.B., and Huskies Stadium in Halifax earlier in the decade.
“When we had those games, we added seats in the endzones that brought us up to 20,000,” Turner said of the regular-season games in Moncton. “We were very successful and it worked out well and the CFL was great to work with, great partners.
“We’ve always been open to working with the CFL and bringing them to Atlantic Canada.”
The hope in Moncton was for a team to locate there but the size of the stadium remained a drawback.
“We knew they were very interested in Atlantic Canada,” Turner said. “Like anything else, you have to find a willing partner and it looks like (Halifax) may have accomplished that. It’s great news for Atlantic Canada. It’s exciting.”
Turner thinks the fans that filled the Moncton Stadium on the campus of Universite de Moncton would also buy tickets for games in Halifax.
“We’ve always thought regionally about a franchise. We’ve all looked toward Saskatchewan and what’s happened there and see the same kind of model working in Atlantic Canada. All of our markets are probably too small but, collectively, we can certainly support a franchise.
“We are optimistic that there might be a role that we could play — exhibition games, training camp, even regular season games. We’ve got a really great stadium and it’s a proven entity. The CFL knows how Moncton embraces the CFL and, with the successes we’ve had, we now have to look toward Halifax and Nova Scotia.”
Turner said a “tremendous” number of Nova Scotia fans attended the two regular season CFL games in Moncton.
“I’m sure the reverse will happen if the team is playing out of Halifax. You will see New Brunswick and P.E.I. supporting it. It’s good for the region, really.”
Worth the risk?
Not everyone is convinced that the league is good for the region or that sufficient regional, or even local support, will materialize.
Derek Martin is president of Sports and Entertainment Atlantic, which plans, delivers and promotes events across the region.
“I grew up in Hamilton going to CFL games,” Martin said. “I played high school football, university football and pro football in Europe. I love the game but I am now a parent and my two sons are not registered in football due to the risks to their brains and bodies.”
Martin said there is no assurance that fans will embrace the league here.
“The future of the sport of football is precarious and we may be a few decades late to the party. The NFL is trending down in all applicable metrics and I fear the CFL is not far behind. Our market size is also small, it’s growing but is still small and there is not a grassroots base in Nova Scotia like there is in markets that have had professional football for decades. I hear the comparison to Saskatchewan often as a similar-sized market that has embraced the CFL but there are decades of cultural immersion at play in that market that can’t simply be replicated here overnight.”
Martin is also lukewarm toward the construction of an expensive stadium to host CFL games.
“Anything is possible and Halifax has certainly been kicking the can on a stadium for a long time but I don’t believe the fundamental issues have changed,” he said. “The business case for a permanent 20,000-plus-seat stadium is difficult to make and will likely require significant public investment one way or another. As a sports fan, it would certainly be nice to have but as a taxpayer, I can appreciate the valid concerns that we have other priorities in our community.”
Martin, who has led the push for a Halifax soccer team in the Canadian Premier League that is to begin play next year with six to eight teams, proposed a 7,000-seat pop-up stadium on the Wanderers Grounds in downtown Halifax. City council signed off on that proposal in June.
“We are committed to our plan to play at the Wanderers Grounds in a privately funded, modular, right-sized stadium,” said Martin, adding that if Halifax is awarded a team, it would likely begin play in 2019. He said the soccer team would not play in the bigger stadium if it were built.
The city will continue to own the four-hectare, natural-grass Wanderers Grounds property and would rent it to Sports and Entertainment Atlantic to host 10 home games. The stands will be removed at season’s end.
While the soccer stadium deal seems to be falling into place, the football stadium debate about financing and ownership is ongoing. But if somebody builds it, Mayor Mike Savage thinks there are enough interested fans to fill it. “I think there are a lot of football fans in HRM, I think there are a lot of concert fans in HRM,” Savage said. “By and large, the support would come from here, but I think you do need to supplement that with interest from around the region. It’s there as well.”
Turner said people would travel from New Brunswick and P.E.I. for CFL games in Halifax, stay overnight and spend their money in Halifax hotels, restaurants, bars and shops.
“Absolutely,” Turner said. “Anytime you have a major professional sports team in your community, it’s good for the economy. That’s what it’s all about. If you can drive your economy, it’s good for everyone.”
LeBlanc agrees, saying a CFL schedule of 10 games a season would spark the local economy.
“Our view of the world is that these types of stadiums obviously need an anchor tenant to get off the ground,” LeBlanc said of his proposed 24,000- to 26,000-seat facility. “Especially with football, they have to be much more than just a football stadium. But those are an important 10 dates. You throw 10 dates in, you’re bringing 250,000-plus people to the stadium on an annual basis. That’s real money, not to mention the benefit to the community.”