As Centennial celebrations go this one is coming in with a bit of a thud.
Although you have to give the CSA a tiny little bit of credit for trying – a few years ago they may not have noticed it was their 100th birthday until mid-September – overall this celebration is shaping up to become yet another lost opportunity to gain exposure for the sport.
Rather than having a true party across the country for 365 days, the CSA has booked two friendlies and made a blue strip with Umbro. There is nothing wrong with those initiatives on their own, but they are kind of floating out there in isolation. Notably, there is very little connection between the women’s game in Moncton Wednesday and Sunday’s clash in Toronto against the USA.
Surely the CSA didn’t think it could schedule the games, sit back and wait for the excitement to build, did they? You would hope that they would understand that selling the game in Canada (outside of the three MLS clubs) is a challenge. They have had 100 years to learn that lesson.
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Yet, here we are. The two games failed to attract widespread excitement in either community. Toronto is old news, but the failure to sell out Moncton has to be considered a disaster. Getting a community of that size excited by hosting a national team should have been a fairly easy exercise. Yet, beyond what appeared to be a lot of youth club group sales, there didn’t appear to be much traction. True, soccer isn’t the biggest sport in Atlantic Canada, but there is a soccer community there and, more importantly, there are underserved sports fans there.
Truth be told, Mission Moncton was a bit flaccid.
In Toronto, CSN has been told that they have sold 12,000 to 14,000 tickets for the game. With walk-ups, the CSA is hoping for a dream number of about 17,000, with a more realistic target of 15,000.
BMO Field sits just shy of 22,000. That’s a lot of red seats. Even if they hit 17,000, which would be about 1,000 less than a typical TFC games this year.
The kneejerk reaction of many outside of Toronto will be to look down their nose and judge the country’s biggest city. Hating on Toronto comes easy to many, but it’s rarely productive and it ignores the core problems.
If the problem is Toronto, why didn’t Moncton sell out? Why were there less than 10,000 in BC Place for early games of Olympic qualifying?
Getting fans excited about watching Canada isn’t a Toronto problem. It’s a Canada problem. Beyond that, it’s not a fan problem either. That would be to blame the victim.
The villain here is the marketing arm of the CSA. They’ll cry poor – and they won’t be wrong – but they need to do a better job. Based on what has been seen around Toronto in the lead up to Sunday (not much) they need to do a job, period.
Let’s think back to the Olympic qualifying event. If you listen or read interviews from the week before the event people were really concerned. There were only about 5,000 tickets sold and organizers were facing the prospect of playing in front of nearly 20,000 empty seats.
But, then something happened. And, it wasn’t some sort of magic awakening of a fan base that is somehow better than it is in other parts of the country. No, Vancouver fans are no better or worse than fans in Moose Jaw, Fredericton, Yellowknife, or, yes, Toronto.
What happened in Vancouver was that Sportsnet got a hold of the thing.
The television network packaged it and promoted the hell out of it. They made it an event and they created excitement about it. Without that push there would have been many in Lower Mainland unaware that it was even happening. We live in a busy world. You need to actively tell people about your product.
The CSA didn’t and isn’t. Sportsnet had a week to do so and the result was 25,000 for the final.
How did it do it? By old fashioned hustle and pizzazz (i.e. Marketing)
It works. Crazy, eh?
Bringing it back to the Toronto game, it was about two weeks ago when Voyageurs president Jamie MacLeod was granted permission to promote the USA and Honduras games in BMO Field. inside the stadium, he approached fans individually and engaged them in a conversation about the games.
Talking to me after, he told me that the reception by fans was almost universally positive. The fans were happy to hear about Canada and were interested in going to the games. However, there was another side to it.
MacLeod said that close to 75 per cent of the fans – and these are fans at a TFC game remember, not random fans at a Blue Jays game or something – did not know that there was a game coming up. Remember, these people were soccer fans. Maybe not obsessed soccer fans, but fans none the less.
Even more surprisingly, a significant amount of those fans were not only not unaware that Canada was playing the USA this Sunday, they were also unaware that Canada had a team at all.
Yes, fans at a Toronto FC game were unaware that Canada entered a team in World Cup qualifying.
Staggering.
It’s easy to dismiss an anecdote like that as being unrepresentative. However, the evidence suggests otherwise. Fans only suddenly appeared in Toronto when a highly visible MLS team arrived. They were nowhere to be found prior to TFC and the marketing push MLSE gave it. In time, some of them became engaged and now are equally supportive of the Canadian national team. However, others remain more casual. The CSA is doing nothing to reach those fans.
They need to start. When you turn on your television Sunday and see red seats at BMO Field check your response. Stop blaming the fans that aren’t there and maybe aren’t even aware that there is a game to go to.
No, put the blame where it belongs – with the CSA.