The Canadian Football League loses its biggest cheerleader
Randy Ambrosie was nothing if not a CFL commissioner with big ideas. They just didn't work out often enough
It was at the Grey Cup in 2018 that CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie first announced his plan for global domination.
As part of his usual state-of-the-league address to the media, he had brought in an executive from the LAF, a Mexico-based semi-professional league of American-style football. Not futbol, to be clear. Football, the kind with the funny-shaped balls. The CFL and the LAF were signing a cooperation agreement, which Ambrosie explained would hopefully provide a pathway for certain exceptional Mexican players to join the CFL. The details were non-existent, but Ambrosie talked up the partnership as the first of many, as he was keen to get as many football associations in as many foreign nations as possible to sign similar deals.
The concept, in its simplest form, was this: foreign player becomes CFL regular, and then foreign nation becomes interested in CFL. Next stop, profit.
From the outset, it was an incredible moonshot. Even if you allowed for the possibility that a few players from outside the United States or Canada might be good enough to make CFL rosters, and even if you granted that some foreign nation’s sports channel (or streaming service) might be convinced to offer the CFL some money for its broadcast rights, what were the odds that there would be enough foreign players from any single country to warrant a broadcast deal? Put another way, how many Germans would need to be playing CFL football for a German media company to want to broadcast CFL games? Wouldn’t the answer obviously have to be “many Germans”?
When it came time for questions, I asked Ambrosie something along the lines of, “Don’t you have bigger problems to worry about?” The CFL was popular in the Prairies and in Hamilton and Ottawa, but had flatlined in its biggest markets. Didn’t Ambrosie, who hadn’t been commissioner for very long at the time, need to focus on those problems first?
His response was something along the lines of, “Why not do both?” Yes, the CFL had challenges in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, but it could also embark on this global expansion strategy, which the commissioner, without any irony, called his plan to make the CFL “the biggest global football league in the world."
Friends, he could not do both. The CFL announced Ambrosie’s pending retirement on the weekend, which will come after the Grey Cup next month. His global plans, branded CFL 2.0, which at one point had him touting cooperating agreements with football groups in more than a dozen countries, from Finland to Mexico to Japan, have mostly settled into a way for teams to add a couple of Australian kickers to their rosters.
The best thing to say about the Ambrosie tenure is that the former CFL player was passionate about the league and fond of big ideas. The other thing to say is that the ideas didn’t work out. In the years since CFL 2.0 was announced, the actual biggest football league in the world has moved aggressively to add games in Europe and South America. I can’t imagine this was a response to the CFL’s musing about global expansion, but the end result is the same: there is zero chance of the Canadian league making inroads in any of these faraway lands while the NFL is swinging its weight around and talking seriously about playing dozens of international games every season.
Ambrosie tried to expand to Halifax, with the very weird strategy of announcing a team and ownership group before anyone had figured out a stadium deal. That process became a typical stadium grift, with the owners of the Atlantic Schooners hoping that the province of Nova Scotia would pay for a significant part of the construction cost — and when that didn’t work out they proposed a half-stadium, built cheaply, with the potential to build the other half once the team was established as a roaring success. That also didn’t take. Ambrosie’s 2023 ultimatum that the Halifax area had to show serious interest in a CFL team — with actual money — or else they wouldn’t keep playing an annual game in the region led to no Atlantic game in the 2024 season.
There was also the brief partnership with the XFL, which came after the CFL was forced to cancel the 2020 season during the COVID pandemic. This thing amounted to so little that it is easily forgotten, but it’s worth recounting here: Ambrosie announced in March of 2021 that the CFL and the XFL, which had been purchased out of bankruptcy by actor/wrestler Dwayne Johnson and partners, were in discussions about, like, football and stuff. Not a merger or a takeover or anything that concrete, but just, you know, how to grow football. Ambrosie literally insisted that these discussions were “the beginning of a beginning,” which was once the same way he described CFL 2.0. There were reports that certain teams (Toronto, most notably) were interested in some kind merger, but in the end nothing happened. On its own, a process that resulted in the status quo doesn’t mean much, except Ambrosie had already gone to Ottawa mid-pandemic and asked for $150-million to keep the CFL operating during its shutdown. The league’s teams collectively lost tens of millions of dollars a year, he said. This is what made the XFL dalliance significant: maybe the CFL was willing to kill itself in order to save itself?
Three years later, it is still trundling along. Ambrosie can correctly claim to have helped solidify the ownership situation in Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton, all of which have relatively new buyers who seem to be happy with the purchase. Calgary, Saskatchewan, Hamilton, Ottawa: fine all around. That is to say, either profitable or accepting of the annual losses. And then there is Toronto. Not only have the Argonauts failed to make significant inroads in the league’s biggest market over Ambrosie’s tenure, a period that included two Grey Cup wins, the franchise has recently seen its corporate parent undergo an ownership change. Bell Canada is out and Rogers Communications is taking over its share, pending regulatory approval. Bell owns TSN, which holds the CFL’s broadcast rights. Rogers’ Sportsnet is not a CFL partner. When Bell (and Larry Tanenbaum) bought the Argos in 2015, it was seen as somewhat of a charity buy. Bell was backstopping a franchise that was necessary to make its CFL product viable, Tanenbaum didn’t want the Argos to die if he could help them avoid it. The Argos were later folded into MLSE in a transaction that never seemed to make sense for Rogers — why would it want part ownership of a struggling asset? — unless there was some quid pro quo aspect to the deal that took place behind closed doors.
Whatever the case, will a Rogers-controlled MLSE still want anything to do with the Argos? If it doesn’t, Ambrosie will at least be able to say he got out at the right time, before Toronto’s CFL team became a ward of the state, yet again.
In the spring of 2023, I sat with Ambrosie for an interview ahead of that CFL season, and when we talked about what would happen if the team in Halifax didn’t come to pass, he was, as usual, relentlessly upbeat. There were other potential cities for a 10th team. Any why stop at 10? Why not 11 or 12? As was often the case when I spoke with Ambrosie, I found myself bewildered. Like, CFL teams in Quebec City, Victoria and Guelph? You cannot be serious. And yet, he was.
I don’t know how many times over the years I heard Ambrosie speak about the challenges that the CFL had to overcome: it needed younger fans, and needed to find support from the immigrant communities, and had to win back urban areas that had long since given up on it. None of this was new. CFL commissioners have been saying similar for 40 years. And it always felt like rather than figure out how to solve those problems — which were difficult! — Ambrosie wanted to pour his energy into stuff that had the potential for a big payoff, even if the prospects of that happening were slim.
It would seem that enough of his bosses have decided that they want someone else to give it a crack now. Whoever the next CFL commissioner is, they will inherit a familiar to-do list. It’s pretty much the same one that Ambrosie had on Day 1.