ShonTron
Moderator
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- Joined
- Apr 24, 2007
- Messages
- 12,407
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- Ward 13 - Toronto Centre
While I think I can't believe the average $250/ticket for the NFL here, I can't say that, because of the outrageous prices people pay to see a lousy NHL team, the only one with its own digital pay TV station for broadcasting regular games.
Toronto is badly underserved. Therefore people like Godfrey and Royal Tanenbaum can charge such high prices for these games you can see in Buffalo for one-fifth the price.
LIMIKE: While ACC wasn't taxpayer-funded, SkyDome was (for $600 million in 1989 dollars, purhased by Rogers for $25 million 15 years later) and so are MLSE's other facilities, like the new training centre, their arena in Oshawa, and the Soccer Stadium (where they kept the surplus from the BMO naming rights for themselves).
Star: Fans should be wary of Bills shuffle
Feb 07, 2008 04:30 AM
Dave Perkins
SPORTS Columnist
Once again, they are peeing in our ears and telling us it's raining.
Larry Tanenbaum, Ted Rogers and Phil Lind don't trust football fans enough to tell them the truth about the Buffalo Bills coming to Toronto for one regular-season game a year over five years, plus three exhibition games.
It's clearly about getting an NFL team for Toronto and this is the best first step: To show the league there are enough customers who will fork over a top price of probably $350 a ticket – with, Lind promised, a few sub-$100 seats up in the Ueckers – to demonstrate the drive of the market.
Now, they all know the real goal here. You know it. The NFL knows it. Even Ralph Wilson Jr., who owns the Bills and is trying to make the team's eventual exit from downtrodden Buffalo as painless as possible, knows it. How did Wilson put it yesterday about the Bills' dwindling market? "We've overturned all the rocks in western New York and we had to look this way."
Paul Godfrey has spent a quarter-century striving for an NFL team in Toronto and now that something concrete is actually happening, Godfrey must bite his tongue and toe the party line, which, according to Lind, is this: "Our entire focus is on these games and only these games."
Here's the truth: Larry Tanenbaum wants to own a team. Ted Rogers wants to make money, but Larry wants to be Jerry Jones. He's in charge of the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment conglomerate, but he isn't. Not really. The board of directors, anchored by the money-lenders at the Teachers Pension Plan, calls the shots, sometimes over Larry's objections.
An NFL team, he figures, is his path to 51 per cent; Rogers will take a position and owns the temporary playpen, which doubtless will be stuffed for the games. (There were some 500 names on the waiting list before yesterday's press conference ended.)
The fiction is that the Bills testing the water in Toronto can't hurt the Canadian Football League and that the Argonauts and CFL commissioner Mark Cohon are supportively on board. In reality, the Argos were offered participation in a done deal – their season-ticket holders go to the front of the line – and Cohon has two choices: He can try to make nice with the NFL and grab a little here and there, even though seven of his eight owners are against it, or he can scream and shout and be ignored.
As for the CFL, we know Tanenbaum's feelings here: When he and the gang at MLSE hijacked that publicly financed soccer stadium, the first thing they did was pour concrete close enough to the field to assure that no CFL game, much less a high school championship, could be played there. That didn't bother Rogers, either; the Argos will remain his tenant at the SkyDome, which, he chortled yesterday, "cost other people $600 million to build (and) we got for $25 million."
You know who those "other people" are. The same ones who will be asked to lay out the seed money for a 72,000-seat NFL stadium that the team owners will surely come asking for.
The new website, ostensibly to register participants in the ticket lottery that will be held, is part of the plan, too. It will collect thousands of names of interested NFL fans who will be the place to start when they offer personal seat licences, starting at $10,000 each, to finance the new stadium. Let's see, 60,000 PSLs at $10,000 each is $600 million. The guess here is that they'll allow taxpayers to contribute the rest.
It all starts, though, with them pretending there's no end game here. Please pass the Kleenex.
Toronto is badly underserved. Therefore people like Godfrey and Royal Tanenbaum can charge such high prices for these games you can see in Buffalo for one-fifth the price.
LIMIKE: While ACC wasn't taxpayer-funded, SkyDome was (for $600 million in 1989 dollars, purhased by Rogers for $25 million 15 years later) and so are MLSE's other facilities, like the new training centre, their arena in Oshawa, and the Soccer Stadium (where they kept the surplus from the BMO naming rights for themselves).
Star: Fans should be wary of Bills shuffle
Feb 07, 2008 04:30 AM
Dave Perkins
SPORTS Columnist
Once again, they are peeing in our ears and telling us it's raining.
Larry Tanenbaum, Ted Rogers and Phil Lind don't trust football fans enough to tell them the truth about the Buffalo Bills coming to Toronto for one regular-season game a year over five years, plus three exhibition games.
It's clearly about getting an NFL team for Toronto and this is the best first step: To show the league there are enough customers who will fork over a top price of probably $350 a ticket – with, Lind promised, a few sub-$100 seats up in the Ueckers – to demonstrate the drive of the market.
Now, they all know the real goal here. You know it. The NFL knows it. Even Ralph Wilson Jr., who owns the Bills and is trying to make the team's eventual exit from downtrodden Buffalo as painless as possible, knows it. How did Wilson put it yesterday about the Bills' dwindling market? "We've overturned all the rocks in western New York and we had to look this way."
Paul Godfrey has spent a quarter-century striving for an NFL team in Toronto and now that something concrete is actually happening, Godfrey must bite his tongue and toe the party line, which, according to Lind, is this: "Our entire focus is on these games and only these games."
Here's the truth: Larry Tanenbaum wants to own a team. Ted Rogers wants to make money, but Larry wants to be Jerry Jones. He's in charge of the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment conglomerate, but he isn't. Not really. The board of directors, anchored by the money-lenders at the Teachers Pension Plan, calls the shots, sometimes over Larry's objections.
An NFL team, he figures, is his path to 51 per cent; Rogers will take a position and owns the temporary playpen, which doubtless will be stuffed for the games. (There were some 500 names on the waiting list before yesterday's press conference ended.)
The fiction is that the Bills testing the water in Toronto can't hurt the Canadian Football League and that the Argonauts and CFL commissioner Mark Cohon are supportively on board. In reality, the Argos were offered participation in a done deal – their season-ticket holders go to the front of the line – and Cohon has two choices: He can try to make nice with the NFL and grab a little here and there, even though seven of his eight owners are against it, or he can scream and shout and be ignored.
As for the CFL, we know Tanenbaum's feelings here: When he and the gang at MLSE hijacked that publicly financed soccer stadium, the first thing they did was pour concrete close enough to the field to assure that no CFL game, much less a high school championship, could be played there. That didn't bother Rogers, either; the Argos will remain his tenant at the SkyDome, which, he chortled yesterday, "cost other people $600 million to build (and) we got for $25 million."
You know who those "other people" are. The same ones who will be asked to lay out the seed money for a 72,000-seat NFL stadium that the team owners will surely come asking for.
The new website, ostensibly to register participants in the ticket lottery that will be held, is part of the plan, too. It will collect thousands of names of interested NFL fans who will be the place to start when they offer personal seat licences, starting at $10,000 each, to finance the new stadium. Let's see, 60,000 PSLs at $10,000 each is $600 million. The guess here is that they'll allow taxpayers to contribute the rest.
It all starts, though, with them pretending there's no end game here. Please pass the Kleenex.
