CPL 2023 Season Attendance

[Kingston]

15 minutes ago, narduch said:

What he is pining for is essentially what League 1 Canada is becoming 

So in a round about way he got his wish

I agree that the L1 leagues are approaching what Ozzie has suggested.

Again, to be entirely fair to him, what I think he's actually suggesting, however, is that the current CPL model is not financially viable and that the CPL should operate at a regional bus league level that would still be professional and still therefore be a cut above the L1 leagues.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

The L1 leagues are basically just repackaged provincial amateur leagues revolving around teams from the suburban youth clubs that dominate the provincial associations because of youth soccer's player registration related voting power drawing not much more than friends and family for the most part. It's absurd to bring them into any conversation about genuinely professional soccer. CanPL's interest in that level is probably mainly just to use it as a placeholder to prevent a rival ever using a lower level of pro sanctioning to challenge them down the road like Joe Belan appears to have been trying to do.

The Quebec-Windsor corridor has half of Canada's population in an area that can easily be travelled overnight by bus minor league hockey or baseball style. Laval to Halifax is in that sort of ballpark as well in travel terms, hence why the QMJHL was able to extend into the Maritimes. Setting things up a little differently in regional conferences in a way that makes crowds of 2500-3000 enough to potentially sustain a reasonably high level of pro soccer wasn't mission impossible. It's just not the sort of setup that was going to excite investors who wanted to use CSA sanctioning to strong arm a slice of the sort of action the three MLS franchises have got going.

I actually would have zero problem with what CanPL were trying to do if I thought it was likely going to work in at least eight market in the medium to long term but it's the all too familiar story of non-soccer people in North America getting dollar signs before their eyes like a cartoon character and having completely unrealistic expectations of what is actually doable with the player base and soccer fanbase available to them because they simply don't understand the sport they are investing in. Where are the Canadian players? etc, like most soccer fans in the the major cities give a #### about that angle instead of caring about the quality of the players they are watching.

Edited August 4, 2023 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[narduch]

So now he is also arguing that Canada's national league should only have teams from Windsor to Quebec City

Lmfao. What a joke.

[Kingston]

1 hour ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

The Quebec-Windsor corridor has half of Canada's population in an area that can easily be travelled overnight by bus minor league hockey or baseball style. Laval to Halifax is in that sort of ballpark as well in travel terms, hence why the QMJHL was able to extend into the Maritimes. Setting things up a little differently in regional conferences in a way that makes crowds of 2500-3000 enough to potentially sustain a reasonably high level of pro soccer wasn't mission impossible. It's just not the sort of setup that was going to excite investors who wanted to use CSA sanctioning to strong arm a slice of the sort of action the three MLS franchises have got going.

There are two main responses here.

First, investors.  Investors are a necessary part of having a league.  If investors are only interested if the CPL uses its current approach and gives them at least an outside shot at future expansion fees/media money, then that's the way to try things.

Second, and more importantly, the markets.  If we're looking at a CHL-type model with national coverage then we're looking at (at least) three regional bus leagues.  Each league presumably needs a minimum of eight teams.  You mentioned 2500 to 3000 as attendance figures for this version of the CPL.

I see no evidence that there are 24 markets which can sustain those sorts of attendance figures.  Even with the current CPL playing at a higher, presumably more attractive, level we have so far found only seven markets that can sustain your bus league targets.  I personally find it far more likely that we can get eight teams up to the 5000 level needed for the current CPL than that we can find seventeen more markets to support 2500-3000 crowds at a lower level of soccer.  Especially when the eight teams can be anywhere in Canada while the seventeen new teams would have to come mostly from less populated regions if you still want national coverage.

 

 

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

27 minutes ago, Kingston said:

...If we're looking at a CHL-type model with national coverage then we're looking at (at least) three regional bus leagues...

...and on and on starting with that non-sequitur. Given how short the season winds up being in Canada you could do this with two east and west conferences of six as a starting point, while Bob Young & Co very much wanted to start with 8 coast-to-coast. Is 8 vs 12 such a huge difference?

Investors in K/W and Saskatchewan were very much interested in being on board from the get go in 2019 but ultimately the key stumbling black was that suitable stadia for what CanPL had in mind were not available. The CanPL execs were in London talking to the owner of FC London pre-launch and even though that didn't get so far again the key issue was the lack of a suitable stadium

Scale back on that angle a bit because the goals are now lower on crowd break even terms and suddenly reaching 12 isn't looking quite so challenging especially if lowering the bar away from the Forge's CFL stadium sort of approach also provides a way in for a couple of teams in Quebec and the group in Kelowna that was said to be interested.

Edited August 4, 2023 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[SpursFlu]

I think there should be regional Leagues. Like a League 1 BC, League 1 Prairies, League 1 Ontario, League 1 Quebec & League 1 Atlantic. To save money they should ride a bus and play a shortened summer schedule. It should focus on youth development and maybe each League winner could qualify for the Voyageurs Cup. Sounds like pie in the sky stuff but I like to think big. Plus I'm really concerned that other people might lose their own money. That's always a big concern of mine. 

[Kingston]

49 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

...and on and on starting with that non-sequitur. Given how short the season winds up being in Canada you could do this with two east and west conferences of six as a starting point, while Bob Young & Co very much wanted to start with 8 coast-to-coast. Is 8 vs 12 such a huge difference?

So let's say we go with two, east west, six team conferences using a bus league.  You are correct that this is not much different than eight teams nationally.  I'm assuming something like:

Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Kelowna (?)

Halifax, Quebec, Montreal (?), Ottawa, Hamilton, KW, London, Windsor (?)

The problem is that the supposed advantage of a bus league is reduced travel costs.  Those are some long bus trips, though, which offsets some travel savings.

Let's assume the team travels with 24 people including staff.  Hotels $300 per night for two people per room.  Meals $100 per person per day.  Airfare $500 per person.

So under the current model, an away game costs:

24 * $500 = $12 000 air fare

24 * $150 * 2 days = $7200 hotel

24 * $100 * 2 days = $4800 meals

Total = $24 000

With a bus league, we have:

bus rental $1500 * 3 days = $4500

24 * $150 * 3 days = $10 800 hotel

24 * $100 * 3 days = $7200 meals

Total = $22 500 (could be cut to $15 000 for closer, two day bus trips)

The difference is something like $6000 per away game or about $85 000 per year.  Go ahead and insert your own estimates.  Maybe the savings are actually $100 000 or even $125 000.  But we're basically talking about the difference between air fare and bus rental offset by the extra hotel and meal days.

Player salaries are $1 million.  Staff salaries are around $500 000.  Travel costs with air fare are around $350 000.  I don't know what insurance, advertising, stadium rental, game day costs, and so on amount to, but let's say a total budget of maybe $2.5 million.

Saving something like $100 000 by switching the entire league to a bus model doesn't actually reduce the costs very much.  Even if my estimates are wrong and the savings are double, it's still just an 8% cost reduction.

[Bison44]

Mr Quebec WIndsor corridor seems to think a scaled down cheaper bus league will draw 2500-3000?   In that corridor that has 2 MLS teams?? CPL with bigger budgets etc are having trouble drawing that in less saturated markets.  He has one set of parameters/goalposts that he uses to slag CPL, and another for this mythical bus league where some teams travel 1500-2000km, everything is cheap and they draw better than VAN FC, York or Edmonton did, and almost as much as Calgary and WPG.  If you are talking a bus league a small step up from L10, you should be expecting maybe 500fans, prob less. And with no TV deal, no sponsorship money and no foreign players/coaches to help bring up the standard of play.    

Totally disingenuous, blatantly so, and his plan would leave behind great chunks of the country that for the most part are under scouted, and could be sources of untapped talent.  And the strangest part is that the bus league CHL style patchwork of regional divisons is already growing underneath the CPL....with the help of the CPL.  A true pathway, stepping stones, Usports..L1O/PLSQ...CPL...MLS...beyond!!  Now the CPL might not survive, but this gleeful hand wringing at every piece of disapointing news and slagging the ownership groups that at least tried to build something is just sad.  

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

18 hours ago, Kingston said:

...24 * $150 * 3 days = $10 800 hotel...

Do you really not understand that one of the keys to how minor and junior league hockey works is that the players sleep on the bus when the team is travelling?

https://legacy.dkpittsburghsports.com/2019/03/18/nailers-echl-bus-travel-tlh/

 

Edited August 5, 2023 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[Kingston]

1 hour ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

Do you really not understand that one of the keys to how minor and junior league hockey works is that the players sleep on the bus when the team is travelling?

https://legacy.dkpittsburghsports.com/2019/03/18/nailers-echl-bus-travel-tlh/

The goal is a fully professional CPL.  Bus sleeping is below the target for the league.

[Bison44]

See how the goalposts keep changing.  He thinks 3000 people are going to come out and watch a team that has rode the bus for 15-20 hrs and slept in it, and then played a soccer game.....then the return bus trip again sleeping on the bus.  Who is going to play in a league like that, other than hockey mad teenagers in a hockey mad country??  

[narduch]

Pretty sure you couldn't get away with making adult athletes sleep on a bus in lieu of a hotel.

The CHL gets away with it because our country is stupid 

[Colonel Green]

8 hours ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

I actually would have zero problem with what CanPL were trying to do if I thought it was likely going to work in at least eight market in the medium to long term but it's the all too familiar story of non-soccer people in North America getting dollar signs before their eyes like a cartoon character and having completely unrealistic expectations of what is actually doable with the player base and soccer fanbase available to them because they simply don't understand the sport they are investing in. Where are the Canadian players? etc, like most soccer fans in the the major cities give a #### about that angle instead of caring about the quality of the players they are watching.

I haven't seen much indication that the investors as a whole had wildly unrealistic expectations, you're just projecting that on them. Some of the teams haven't worked out, which is to be expected, but the bulk of them are either successes or trending the right way.

Also, if you're asserting that sports fans primarily care about the quality of the players, why are you proposing a league model that would significantly reduce player quality?

1 hour ago, narduch said:

Pretty sure you couldn't get away with making adult athletes sleep on a bus in lieu of a hotel.

The CHL gets away with it because our country is stupid 

It works in the CHL precisely because the CHL isn't an adult league, it's major-junior, for people who are either the equivalent of student athletes or just doing their time until they turn pro.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

Literally only a few posts back I provided a link to an American newspaper article describing how this approach is also the norm in the ECHL, which is a league that involves adult players and NHL affiliations. Do minor hockey and baseball leagues across North America do this sort of thing for shits and giggles or because it's what has proven to be necessary to make leagues drawing broadly similar attendance to CanPL economically viable decade after decade when dealing with a North American rather than a small European country scale geography? 

I strongly suspect that a lot of people on here are simply oblivious to the reason that Rob Friend & Co wanted 8000 seats in Langley and the expansion to 10,000 in Langford, while David Clanachan was also talking about 10,000 seats in Windsor for his likely never happening expansion team. Those are the sort of crowd numbers that would actually be needed to make CanPL's economic model revolving around D1 rather than minor league optics and the Onesoccer streaming deal work properly long term. CanPL execs have always adopted the posture that their league is a peer of MLS rather than a development league for it, and the original rationale for the CSB deal revolved around CanPL being necessary as a place for at least some of the currently active national team roster to be playing at club level in the run up to 2026.

Remember the recent newspaper article in Ottawa with the Atletico exec pining for a half full CFL stadium for his team? All fine and dandy if they can persuade that many people to start showing up, but what happens if what we are seeing this season across the league is pretty much as good as it's going to get any time soon?

Edited August 5, 2023 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[narduch]

Is the ECHL even really a true bus league?

Noticed Thales have a team in Newfoundland now.

And a few other scattered western teams.

[Colonel Green]

6 hours ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

I strongly suspect that a lot of people on here are simply oblivious to the reason that Rob Friend & Co wanted 8000 seats in Langley and the expansion to 10,000 in Langford, while David Clanachan was also talking about 10,000 seats in Windsor for his likely never happening expansion team. Those are the sort of crowd numbers that would actually be needed to make CanPL's economic model revolving around D1 rather than minor league optics and the Onesoccer streaming deal work properly long term. CanPL execs have always adopted the posture that their league is a peer of MLS rather than a development league for it, and the original rationale for the CSB deal revolved around CanPL being necessary as a place for at least some of the currently active national team roster to be playing at club level in the run up to 2026.

Remember the recent newspaper article in Ottawa with the Atletico exec pining for a half full CFL stadium for his team? All fine and dandy if they can persuade that many people to start showing up, but what happens if what we are seeing this season across the league is pretty much as good as it's going to get any time soon?

Ottawa-Gatineau has 1.5 million people. It's hardly unrealistic to think that the team could draw much bigger numbers long-term. There isn't any reason to think the league will be perpetually stuck at its present level.

Your argument amounts to "it might not succeed, so let's not try at all". Building something of actual use to Canadian soccer takes time and investment, and it involves risking failure (even setting aside that your proposed alternative actually probably has a lower chance of success and much less utility).

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

3 minutes ago, Colonel Green said:

...Your argument amounts to "it might not succeed, so let's not try at all"...

No it doesn't and at no point did I write that so why are you putting it in quotes? You are building an absurd strawman rather than addressing what I have actually written. I explained at length on an earlier page how the league likely could have been launched in significantly more cities than they did (KW, a Saskatchewan team for sure, and possibly in Quebec which was a glaring omission) by setting the bar lower on budgets and stadia. Go with something more readily doable initially and see where organic growth takes you in other words, but they had loftier ambitions than that and more clubs at launch would have limited their ability to try to extort $10 million expansion fees out of future investors.

[Colonel Green]

4 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

No it doesn't and at no point did I write that so why are you putting it in quotes? You are building an absurd strawman rather than addressing what I have actually written. I explained at length on an earlier page how the league likely could have been launched in significantly more cities than they did (KW, a Saskatchewan team for sure, and possibly in Quebec which was a glaring omission) by setting the bar lower on budgets and stadia. Go with something more readily doable initially and see where organic growth takes you in other words, but they had loftier ambitions than that and more clubs at launch would have limited their ability to try to extort $10 million expansion fees out of future investors.

Setting the bar lower on budgets and stadia will correspondingly lower the interest in the league, as well as the value of the media rights that have helped finance the whole thing.

Why is it okay to "see where organic growth takes you" with a bus league but not with a league on a bigger scale? A few years in, and despite the worst possible wrench thrown in the mix with the pandemic, the league has a generally positive trajectory for most of its teams. 

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

1 hour ago, Colonel Green said:

Setting the bar lower on budgets and stadia will correspondingly lower the interest in the league, ...

The league is barely visible in mainstream media terms as things stand, so don't think that necessarily follows. As for your generally positive trajectory what happens if they can't find new owners for York, and the Blue Bombers decide they no longer want to lose $1 million per season on a soccer team? If the bar had been set lower finding new investors and markets is a lot easier. They've painted themselves into a corner where expansion isn't anything like as easy as it could have been and losing significantly more money than they likely expected has already led to two of the initial investor groups bailing out.

Edited August 5, 2023 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[Colonel Green]

7 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

The league is barely visible in mainstream media terms as things stand, so don't think that necessarily follows. As for your generally positive trajectory what happens if they can't find new owners for York and the Blue Bombers decide they no longer want to lose $1 million per season on a soccer team? If the bar had been set lower finding new investors and markets is a lot easier. They've painted themselves into a corner where expansion isn't anything like as easy as it could have been and losing significantly more money than they likely expected to has already led to two of the initial investor groups bailing out.

FC Edmonton, one of the two departing investor groups, already existed prior to the league and folded largely because of those pre-existing issues (honestly, the strongest argument against CPL planning in that instance is that it probably wasn't a good idea to include them in the first place).

If they lose a team, they lose a team. It happens all the time in professional leagues, especially young ones.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

If the USL loses a team it's no big deal because there are lots of other large cities available in the United States. If a Canadian league can't make it work in the GTA and Edmonton and is looking shaky in Winnipeg there are nothing like as many alternatives available if the relatively high budget means anything smaller than 200,000 as a metro area has always been viewed as too small to be viable. 7 clubs is hugely problematic for them in scheduling terms because of the number of weeknight games that are needed and 6 might have worked for the NHL back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth but would be laughable nowadays. Bottom line is they really do need to have 8 minimum.

[BurndenAce]

39 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

If a Canadian league can't make it work in the GTA and Edmonton and is looking shaky in Winnipeg there are nothing like as many alternatives available if the relatively high budget means anything smaller than 200,000 as a metro area has always been viewed as too small to be viable. 

Ozzie, I'm going to try to not come off as hostile, seeing as I don't think I've interacted with you before. The teams failed/are failing in Edmonton, York and Winnipeg (and I would not call Winnipeg failing) for different reasons. I can speak from firsthand experience - York failed because they didn't pick an audience. They wanted to represent the suburbs in York region, then changed their mind halfway through and wanted to represent Toronto. Torontonians see through that easily, which is why they can't pull. It's unfortunately a mistake the commissioners continue to be willing to make again.

 

So it's not that the league "can't make it work in the GTA and Edmonton," it was that a) the Edmonton ownership had existed for years and was drained of cash and b) whoever was in charge of setting up the team in York Region either didn't understand the area or willfully ignored the issue of identity and the hatred the average Torontonian has for the suburbs.

 

Now that being said, you earlier point on stadiums was a very good one, and I find myself increasingly annoyed that the league is hesitant to use existing infrastructure or university stadiums, and if anything spells the death of the league (not that I think it's in any danger), it would be that.

[SpursFlu]

4100 in Calgary 

4000 avg

10%

I'm feeling it

[Aird25]

 

[SpursFlu]

32 minutes ago, Aird25 said:

 

Wow that's amazing. I'm thinking 4000 10% might happen. Great work Ottawa

I find TD Place with a decent crowd looks very nice. It kinda looks like a Soccer Specif down the sidelines