Rob Vanstone: COVID-19 cash crisis magnifies CFL's flaws

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Without playing a game or courting the spotlight of late, the Canadian Football League has nonetheless been exposed.

The financial picture, usually a subject of speculation due to the preponderance of privately owned teams, has proven to be a horror show.

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Supposed drop-dead deadlines have been malleable, to the point where they are not to be taken seriously.

Relations with the CFL Players’ Association clearly are not the best. Some players are rankled over a perceived lack of dialogue with the league office and, principally, the lack of paycheques.

Here we are in August and there are far more questions than answers.

That is understandable, to a degree, because there is not a playbook for dealing with a global pandemic.

That said, the league’s handling of a crisis that is unprecedented in our lifetimes is still open to dissection.

Rewind to May 7, when commissioner Randy Ambrosie addressed a House of Commons standing committee on finance in the hope of garnering anywhere from $30 million to $150 million in federal-government support.

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The presentation was shy of specifics and devoid of input from the CFLPA. However, Ambrosie did disclose that the league’s nine teams, as a collective, typically lose between $10 million and $20 million per annum.

That revelation was a forehead-slapper — a rare peek behind the curtain.

Somehow, the league as a whole is hemorrhaging cash, even though a generous television deal with TSN covers most of the player payroll.

The TV contract should put the league and its member teams in an advantageous situation. Yet, the enterprise is a perennial eight-figure money-loser.

Subsequently, Ambrosie has accentuated the need for a new business plan. But why did it take a pandemic for a revised approach to be deemed imperative?

Keep in mind, of course, that Ambrosie is cast in the unenviable — albeit lucrative — role of messenger. He answers to the nine governors, a disparate lot. The league’s ultimate wielders of influence are an amalgam of affluent private owners and more-accountable guardians of community-owned franchises.

Complicating matters, the CFL is an atypical sporting federation, in that the largest markets are the weakest.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders, once a virtual charity case, had emerged as a financial colossus until COVID-19 imperilled the future of every franchise. The Roughriders could lose $10 million if some semblance of a 2020 season cannot be salvaged.

As of Tuesday afternoon, it did not look promising.

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TSN’s Dave Naylor reported Friday that “the federal government has offered to help the CFL with a short-term loan, at a high interest rate and fees. League believes that taking that kind of loan would put them in a worse position going forward.” The loan would have been provided by the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Then came a Monday report, by Dan Ralph of The Canadian Press, that the league was negotiating with the feds about a $30-million, interest-free loan.

That would be appropriate, in a sense, because the league already has an interest-free market (Toronto).

Without the federal government serving as a benefactor, there doesn’t seem to be the remotest possibility of a truncated 2020 season proceeding in the designated hub city of Winnipeg.

The CFL does not have the wherewithal to construct and secure a bubble on its own.

Looking at the overall equation, the league’s entire future could be on the bubble. Never a massive money-maker at the best of times, the CFL is now trying to wade through a pandemic period of undetermined duration or consequence.

Perhaps the entire process could have been expedited if the initial overtures to the federal government had been more substantial or thorough. Instead, it was one big incompletion.

If you are in any way answerable for disbursements from the public purse, there must be concerns about whether lending tens of millions of dollars to the CFL would be irresponsible, considering Ambrosie’s revelation that the league was in a deficit situation even before COVID-19 exacerbated the problem.

Good times …

“(Bleep) it,” Roughriders receiver Shaq Evans tweeted Monday. “I’m gonna set my own deadline CFL. If I don’t hear anything by Friday I’m just gonna assume the season (is) cancelled. Sick of y’all playing games.”

The only CFL games we are likely to see in 2020.

rvanstone@postmedia.com

twitter.com/robvanstone