Posted by John Vrooman on Friday, January 8, 2016 in National Football League.

Interview with the Toronto Star. 

– With the momentum in Los Angeles, and with the seeming excitement around London, is there any way to assess where Toronto might stand as it relates to the queue for an NFL franchise?

LA and GTA are the two major elephant-in-the-room missing pieces in the NFL expansion-relocation-extortion game that has been played out over the last 2 decades across NA. Over the course of the last 20  years the NFL has expanded and retro-expanded into abandoned markets four times, and yet LA and GTA remain unoccupied.

 It is possible that the LA market has been more valuable to the NFL cartel empty than occupied  in a massive relocation venue extortion shell game since the 1995 expansion into marginal mid-markets of Charlotte and Jacksonville.

 It is also probable that the NFL empty GTA market and the bidding of MLSE drove the auction price of the Buffalo Bills to $1.4 billion.

– The Canadian dollar is sagging badly: What role might that play in any consideration?

The weak loonie has more of an impact on potential NHL expansion into Canada (Quebec City and GTA) than NFL relocation. (As a monopoly league cartel the NFL is very unlikely to expand beyond 32 clubs). Because of extensive revenue sharing in the NFL it doesn’t really matter where a club plays as long as its playing in a new luxury venue. That’s what the relocation extortion game is all about. The cool thing (no pun) about the Great White North is that venues are usually privately financed by the club, rather than being publicly over-subsidized and falsely prioritized like in the U.S.

– The Buffalo Bills did not generate widespread support during their foray into Toronto. Games were not particularly well attended, nor was there a great deal of excitement around the city. How might something like that be perceived at the NFL? Would it threaten to salt the earth, so to speak?

The NFL is fast becoming a made-for-media league and so game-day attendance is important but not critical. Furthermore the corporate presence in Toronto is a good match for the opulent NFL venues where the everyday casual fan is being priced out. Most importantly, the potential 3 billion TV households in GTA trumps any negative vibes from the local acceptance of American football in Ontario. (The opposite is true for the NHL and MLB, where the gate is relatively more important.)

 Unfortunately the NFL and the NHL for that matter are not likely to duplicate existing markets because two monopolies are always worth more than one two-team duopoly. This is why a second NHL expansion team in Toronto makes perfect sense in terms of hockey fan welfare, but not like to happen because it would result in negative sum for internal NHL profit. The competitive economic damage to the Leafs would always exceed the gains to a second team in Hamilton.

 The same is true now to some extent for a possible NFL relocation club in GTA competing with the Buffalo Bills in Western NY. Unfortunately, the best shot for NFL in the GWN was for MLSE to have acquired the Buffalo Bills outright, but the NFL numbers apparently didn’t make economic sense for a stone cold $2 billion (CDN) in GTA.

V