TORONTO – Ted Rogers said today that he and fellow Toronto billionaire Larry Tanenbaum have an agreement to pursue a National Football League team together, should they ever decide to go down that road.
Tanenbaum is chairman of Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment (and is the man primarily in charge of the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs and NBA’s Toronto Raptors). Rogers Communications, of course, owns the Rogers Centre and its primary tenant, the Toronto Blue Jays.
The difference with the NFL, however, is that the league does not let corporations own its teams, so any new team couldn’t be owned by MLSE or RCI. “If there is any follow-through on an ownership basis, then Larry Tanenbaum and myself have agreed to work together to pursue that,” said Rogers.
For now, though, the RCI founder told a conference call of financial analysts on the release of its third quarter results that he is concentrating on making two regular season Buffalo Bills games to be scheduled for Toronto work first, starting next season.
“We have the Rogers Centre and we’d very much like to have it with some NFL games here,” added Rogers, who noted that the Bills could, in fact, be the team to end up in Toronto some day, perhaps partially, anyway.
“Buffalo is a declining market somewhat and it’s questionable whether an NFL franchise just in Buffalo would survive.”
Rogers said the Bills have agreed to play two games a year at the Rogers Centre and they are now concentrating on how to make items like luxury box sales and season ticket sales work in two different cities, countries and currencies.
Rogers also added that his executive vice-chairman Phil Lind is the real power behind getting the NFL into Canada. Lind has been a long-time fan of the game and is well-known in the league’s corridors of power, dating back to his years leading Rogers’ U.S. interests through the 1980s and ‘90s.
For example, when the Baltimore Ravens won Super Bowl XXXV in 2000, Lind watched the game from the field as a guest of the team’s then-owner, Art Modell. It’s an open secret that Lind has long coveted an NFL team in Toronto.
For now though, a Hogtown NFL franchise is on the back burner, said Rogers. “That is not the active file,” he explained, insisting the Bills games in Toronto is the top priority.
– Greg O’Brien
