Looks like the No Argos At BMO movement has failed. MLSE have bought the Toronto Argonauts:
https://www.cfl.ca/2017/12/13/mlse-a...nto-argonauts/
Looks like the No Argos At BMO movement has failed. MLSE have bought the Toronto Argonauts:
https://www.cfl.ca/2017/12/13/mlse-a...nto-argonauts/
Is today April 1st?
With MLSE ownership it may be time to renovate Lamport. It seats 9600 which sounds about right.
The Argos aren't going to Lamport, I assure you this. BMO is their home now, there's no going back. I don't like it, just stating what is the truth.
Meh. Same owners with Rogers as a (silent) partner now. In bigger picture, nothing changes unless we are forced to buy Argos tickets and/or get free Argo tickets like Toronto Marlies ransom pack that some TFC fans were force to buy in the past...Lol
Remember The Man, The Legend, The Goal 5-12-07 and All That #9 Left On The Pitch, Thanks For The Memories !!!
Makes sense for MLSE (media companies) to corner the market on Toronto sports teams.
With TFC expected to get to around 25K season ticket holders and with the talk of expanding BMO, I wonder how this will effect the Argos who have had trouble filling a 20K stadium. Maybe they tarp off the top level?
I heard the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan is thinking about buying the Jays. I wonder if MLSE is still a possible buyer and be to overlord of all Toronto teams.
They already effectively owned them through Bell and Tannenbaum. This just looks like some organizational reshuffling as opposed to a takeover. Not sure what this means for either our future or theirs, if it means anything at all.
I'm guessing this means Rogers will now carry some CFL games.
I have little doubt this will hilariously characterized as more consumer choice at the CRTC.
"There are some people who might have better technique than me, and some may be fitter than me, but the main thing is tactics. With most players, tactics are missing. You can divide tactics into insight, trust, and daring." - Johan Cruyff
I just hope that this does not mean that BMO Field starts to have more Argo signage and Argo whatever in the stadium, now you go to a TFC game and you hardly see any Argo crap in the stadium it still more or less has the feeling that it’s a TFC stadium and the Argos are just a tenant hopefully it stays like that , MLSE needs to remember that TFC was a success from the get go off the field because TFC had a stadium that was dedicated to them, you walked in the stadium and it was all TFC it felt that finally after all the years of being shit on , Soccer had their own home, keep tinkering with all this MLSE and save TFC will eventually become a thing mark my words!
I think it's fairly irrelevant.
Maybe they build the argos some offices/permanent locker room at Kia training ground for practice.
Otherwise we have some minor signage at bmo already for argos, and does anyone really notice it?
I was really skeptical about the field, and it seemed much better for the final this year compared to last,
I imagine the argos will be alot like the Marlies including the free tickets that we will likely get now.
Football fans in toronto want to see Tom brady, not Ricky ray, or the nameless qbs on every other team.
Not another Argos thread...
What's surprising to me: when Bell / Rogers / Tannenbaum bought MLSE in 2012, many of us thought this multi-headed monster was guaranteed to bicker & split up soon. With them now bringing the Argos into the fold as well, it certainly doesn't look like that. And when Michael Friisdahl (formerly of Air Canada) became President and CEO of MLSE about 2 years ago, many of us figured the cost cutting would start soon -- or at least no more big spending as had recently been the case. That hasn't happened either.
I do wonder what having the Argos fully owned by MLSE will mean. Now they will have essentially the same standing within the company as TFC, with TFC having better attendance while the Argos have better TV numbers. (I do realize that TFC's value incl. the SUM partnership is much higher.) But this new arrangement might have some impact on scheduling priorities and other issues at BMO Field.
Last edited by Auzzy; 12-13-2017 at 10:22 PM.
Could this also affect the upcoming of safe standing in 2019/2020 and future expansions?
I did a little measuring on Google Earth, and it's doable. You need 150 yards for a CFL field (including end zones), and if the field was extended south, the end of the south end zone would be less than halfway through the parking lot. There would be a little space left over for a small stand at the south end of Lamport, too.
That said, I don't expect this to ever happen. I think it will be business as usual at BMO Field.
Been thinking about this. Together with the Rogers statements about their sports businesses last week, this announcement is very meaningful.
As Bell and Larry already own the Argos, this is simply Rogers buying in to the Argos. But why? Why now?
Rogers could have bought into the CFL via MLSE anytime, they clearly didn't want to not very long ago, or this weird Tanenbaum/Bell purchase wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.
Just this week Rogers dropped the bomb on sports franchise ownership - and this is for franchises in leagues where they have rights!
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/busi...ake-in-cogeco/
They very publicly stated that (i) they are not getting credit for the value of the sports teams in their stock price, and are looking at ways of “surfacing value”, and (ii) sports teams aren’t contributing - they make a 3% margin, vs 15% for their other businesses (and that 3% is with the Leafs/Raps doing a lot better than they were when they bought into MLSE), and (iii) they get what they need from the rights, not from owning teams. (Wouldn't surprise me if Bell feel the same way.)
If there's one certainty in life that I would bet on, it's that nobody in the world wants to own the Argos except Bell/TSN. There's just been too many years of trying to find buyers.
So both the fact of this, and the timing, are completely bizarre. How to connect the dots? My guess: all of MLSE is on the block, or will be put on the block soon, and this is cleanup as part of the sale process.
The MLSE Board is probably a powder keg waiting to go off, so the conditions for a breakup are always there, and when it ends, I bet we'll hear a ton about that. But I think the catalyst is that sports team values keep going up, skyrocketing really, but these are still bad businesses. The Rockets and Clippers each selling for over $2 billion has to have gotten their attention.
Rogers paid $180M for the Jays, and $500M for their share of MLSE, and they think those pieces are worth $1.6B and $1-1.5B now.
The strategic rationale for Bogers buying MLSE was to block new entrants in the wireless/data space, and that is less of a problem now than it was five years ago. Wind, Public Mobile, Virgin etc have all been smoked, their backers either lost hundreds of millions or were forced to sell out to the big players. Mission accomplished. Nobody is going to rescue Canadians from the highest cellphone and internet rates in the western world. (Thanks CRTC.)
So now what? They own a mishmash of assets in a weird industry they don't know how to manage. Tim Leiweke broke these guys. They want no part of the entertainment business, even when it works, suits don't like asset appreciation businesses that make no money, it scares them. Now is the time to sell. The teams are winning, so MLSE are getting playoff gate and TV booster shots now that they don’t always get. The numbers will all look good to prospective buyers. Bogers will take their chips, count their blessings, go home.
This Argos thing is a porthole into this, but the business reality is that it's a tiny sideshow, a detail that needs to be polished up. Having some (but not all) of the MLSE owners involved in the Argos was messy, for no good reason. When you are selling something for $3-4 billion, you don't need weird, hard to explain arrangements gumming things up. I'll be surprised if the price MLSE paid is more than pocket money, ie $5 million or something (if it was more, it's a kiss to Larry to play nice and go along).
I wouldn’t sweat about new renovations at BMO to make things better for the Argos, because of some new strategic priority. That's not what is going on. I bet things get worse for the Argos, not better, under this arrangement, because the guys who care (Bell) now sit one step removed, with MLSE in between. At the end of this, I'll further bet that Bell winds up buying the Argos for a dollar, from the new owner of MLSE, to save them from being shut down the day after the sale closes, like one of these dying small town newspapers.
MLSE will probably sell to a rich tech guy you've never heard of for bitcoin. Or a Russian or Chinese buyer. The world of offshore billionaires has grown a lot over the last five years. Some of them have houses in Toronto.
Oh one other thing - MLSE may be too big to sell as a single entity. Suspect they may bust it up into pieces, to maximize value. The local sports monopoly thing is a corporate play, and less of a rich guy thing. There are a lot more people who might pay $2 billion for the Raps or Leafs, or $200M for TFC, than there are people who would pay $4 billion for all of it.
Just my wild assed speculation. I know nothing.
Last edited by ensco; 12-14-2017 at 09:57 AM.
"There are some people who might have better technique than me, and some may be fitter than me, but the main thing is tactics. With most players, tactics are missing. You can divide tactics into insight, trust, and daring." - Johan Cruyff
Bogers won't sell MLSE until the Leafs are consistently winning - the profit potential there is huge.
I also think part of the sell off is related to Sportsnet and that hockey contract that is not making money.
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CFL world is full of dinosaurs that make Don Cherry look civilised - football in the US is king where ever it goes and no organization in Canada has had to be second fiddle to another property under an umbrella. It will be interesting seeing how those guys deal with being noticeably 4th fiddle behind the Raptors, for example.
Well it would be interesting to me before I completely gave up on the CFL after how they thought it was OK to bring in Art Briles.
Last edited by OgtheDim; 12-14-2017 at 06:52 AM.
Rogers has already symbolically hung the “for sale” sign out with those public statements. They could be blunt about the Jays because they 100% own them. They were more oblique about MLSE, but the analysts sure got the joke.
Crystallizing a $500 million or billion dollar profit on MLSE dwarfs anything they could hope to do with the Leafs.
Last edited by ensco; 12-14-2017 at 09:53 AM.
"There are some people who might have better technique than me, and some may be fitter than me, but the main thing is tactics. With most players, tactics are missing. You can divide tactics into insight, trust, and daring." - Johan Cruyff
I don't see them build offices at KIA, MLSE normally keeps budgets separate between teams.
With the wolfpack wanting to improve Lamport and MLSE being the caretakers of that facility, I wouldn't be surprised to see Lamport either being the practice facility and offices of the Argos. They are desperate to get a foothold of the liberty village crowd. (that's where all they promotions were focused.)
I see Lamport being redone, with the stadium being expanded into the parking lot, likely a 20K no frills stadium. Wolfpack will need more capacity as they move towards the Super league.
I except some rich American to buy out MLSE (or at least Maple Leafs, Raptors and ACC) if they're truly for sale. Also, I except TFC and Argos will be sold together to someone desperate to get into MLS (probably some rich soccer loving foreigner).
The whole Blue Jay thing is that Rogers probably don't want to spend more money on Rogers centre to make it more baseball friendly stadium. So they're (quietly) cashing out now or at least see who's interested in buying blue jays.
YAY moar cross marketing! Ransom packs everywhere!
I like Disney buying Fox better.
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