CPL new teams speculation

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

22 minutes ago, BigBadBorto said:

The CHL is not a pro league, regardless of what NCAA says.  The players stay as billets with local families and have their "room and board" and all hockey costs paid for. They do receive a small weekly stipend.  The "icehockeycentral" source may not be reliable (first hint is referring to "ice hockey".).  The same article says player maximum stipends have moved up to $300  per week - how does that add up to $50k-$100k per year for players?   

This bit:

...This is in addition to any money they may make from their team’s winnings, sponsorship deals, or personal endorsements...

Worth noting also that it was Forbes that is quoted on the $50,000 average salary for the OHL so the "ice hockey" website wasn't claiming to be the primary source for that information.

A lot of CHL players wind up in U-Sports at Canadian universities with scholarships that have their duration tied into the number of years played in junior hockey. The whole setup is structured in a way that enables them to point at the low stipend to claim it isn't professional but it's an East German athlete from back in the day sort of amateurism. 

I actually think it's good that the CHL places an emphasis on keeping players in high school education. Soccer clubs in Europe don't do that with the teenaged youth players they sign and the majority that don't make it have less to fall back on once the dream is over.

Edited January 6 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[BigBadBorto]

1 hour ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

This bit:

...This is in addition to any money they may make from their team’s winnings, sponsorship deals, or personal endorsements...

Worth noting also that it was Forbes that is quoted on the $50,000 average salary for the OHL so the "ice hockey" website wasn't claiming to be the primary source for that information.

 

Where is the Forbes quote?  I only see the article that references a Forbes study - they very likely are misinterpreting what they may have seen.  The 2 sources do not seem very reliable ("Silverskatefestival.org" and "icehockeycentral.com").  Maybe $50k represents total cost per player including stipends, travel, gear.. which is not the same as player salary.  If you take the high end stipend of $300 per week and consider they are with the team at most 9 months, that gets you to just $11,700 per year.  They aren't any large bonuses for winning championship or endorsements money.   

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

I'm not going to claim expert inside knowledge on junior hockey but to turn this around another way if a junior hockey franchise is drawing 4000 on average for around 34 home games at an average of $20, you are looking at revenues of around $2.7 million before you even get into other game day revenue streams like concessions and merchandising which judging from any time I have been at a Knights game will be significant. Do you really think the genuine rate of player remuneration could conceivably be as low as $11,700 x 26 = $300k, if they were all receiving the high end stipend rate, which they won't be?

CHL franchises are able to avoid additional employment related costs beyond salary that would normally be flowing towards the provincial and federal governments because they have been allowed to not treat the players as paid employees through special exemptions to the relevant legislation. That helps provide even more cash for the owners to use other avenues to go that extra mile to make sure that high draft pick they are particularly keen on actually does sign on the dotted light. Politicians go along with it because it's Canada and it's hockey.

Edited January 6 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[BigBadBorto]

Yes I do believe $300k or so represents what players are getting, likely less than this.  This is why it's such a good business model when compared to CPL and why some former players are looking for at least minimum wages.  You can make a lot of money when you sell 4k+ tickets (even more when Mooseheads and Knights sell 8k).  I would suspect break-even is somewhere around 2-3k tickets sold per game, vs 5k or so for CPL.

[narduch]

29 minutes ago, BigBadBorto said:

Yes I do believe $300k or so represents what players are getting, likely less than this.  This is why it's such a good business model when compared to CPL and why some former players are looking for at least minimum wages.  You can make a lot of money when you sell 4k+ tickets (even more when Mooseheads and Knights sell 8k).  I would suspect break-even is somewhere around 2-3k tickets sold per game, vs 5k or so for CPL.

Aren't there rumors London pays players under the table?

[BigBadBorto]

I'm in Halifax so don't know about any rumours like this in London.  Haven't heard of it for the Mooseheads.  I would be surprised if this were happening very much in the CHL.  The damage to the team and owners reputation would be huge and costly

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

1 hour ago, BigBadBorto said:

...I would suspect break-even is somewhere around 2-3k tickets sold per game, vs 5k or so for CPL.

We'll have to agree to disagree about the rest but this part I would go along with although probably for different reasons. The smaller WHL and QJMHL franchises appear to be able to hang in there at that sort of number.

Where I think there are lessons to be learned for soccer is at least some of the ways they are able to curtail costs and keep their break even under control. Less danger of running up a $125 million cumulative loss that way.

I also strongly suspect that one of the reasons CanPL does so well in Halifax is that it's exactly the sort of city where a CHL game is viewed as a big event. Compare and contrast with the Mississauga Steelheads. 

[BigBadBorto]

The Wanderers success is (IMO) a mixture of 4 key factors.  

1.  The stadium location downtown.  Close to many restaurants and pubs for before and after the game.  Parking is not really an issue - games are on weekends or weekday evenings so there are many spots available within 5 minute walk.  Lots of good transit access too

2.  Big event experience.  This is related to #1 as it would be harder to create this experience out in the suburbs.  Each game has a big event feel to it and you can feel the energy around downtown leading up to game time - seeing people wearing jerseys, ads on buses and storefronts (many restaurants have "this way to Wanderers grounds" signs on their windows).

3.  Smart ownership and marketing.  The owner Derek Martin took a big risk on this team and building a pop up stadium in a startup league.  He partnered with Soccer NS to make sure none of the league games for the local soccer teams's conflicted with Wanderers home games and have formed partnerships with locals teams.  This wasn't done by our local pro basketball team (the Hurricanes) and was part of the reason they folded a couple years ago.  Lots of smart facebook/twitter/instagram activity to keep fans connected.  We also have 2 good podcasts about the team that keep fans connected to the team even during offseason

4. Being the main pro sport in a mid sized city.  Halifax will never be big enough to get an MLS or NHL team.  CPL and CHL are the biggest game in town - for Winter (and late fall early spring) the Mooseheads are the big event to see and in Summer (and late spring early fall) now the Wanderers.  

 

The Mooseheads (CHL team) also have done a great job creating big game experience and they are downtown as well.  To my big surprise our new pro Lacross team get 8k+ crowds and are a big success- they also play downtown at same place as Mooseheads.  I've yet to see a Lacross game but those who have gone say  its a blast.

 

Edited January 6 by BigBadBorto

[red card]

9 hours ago, BigBadBorto said:

The CHL is not a pro league, regardless of what NCAA says.  The players stay as billets with local families and have their "room and board" and all hockey costs paid for. They do receive a small weekly stipend.  The "icehockeycentral" source may not be reliable (first hint is referring to "ice hockey".).  The same article says player maximum stipends have moved up to $300  per week - how does that add up to $50k-$100k per year for players?    That being said, there is a lawsuit in play where former players are looking to be paid mimimum wage for their work..  Either way, it would not nearly add up to CPL salaries (which I have heard may be in the $40-$80k/year range)  

Your point about financial model being better in CHL is valid though..  particularly much lower travel costs - with teams being much closer together and much of the travel done by bus.  They do stay in hotels though.  ( My sons hockey team was in Moncton for a tournament and the Halifax Mooseheads were staying at same hotel which was pretty cool for the kids..)

I also agree London would be a great city for CPL.  London plus either Windsor or Kitchener in Southern Ontario would be great

 

 

The lawsuit was settled for $30 million and no minimum wage has to be paid. This occurred about 3 years ago but nothing has been paid out because of other litigation. Certain provinces/states have now changed their laws to make CHL exempt from minimum wage laws.

The lawsuit did fetter out some of the financials about OHL/WHL teams based on various analysis by sports business profs. There was some conflicting conclusions but the consensus view is that a few teams are making decent money (over $1m/yr) while 50% are losing money with a few losing over $1m/yr. In the OHL, only 6-7 teams or 35% are consistently profitable.

Smallest revenue team produces about $2m/yr. Average OHL/WHL team makes only $3.5k/yr in profit. KPMG said the total profit of all CHL teams combined was only $3m/yr.

CHL team in a city with over 1m population is valued over $60m while teams in cities less than 100k are worth an average of $6.2m. Most valued team back in 2016 was Calgary at $69m. Least valued was Swift Current at $970k.

OHL/WHL teams each pay out over $2m/yr to pay university tuition for the players. 80% of the teams in OHL/WHL would be in a loss position with minimum wage. They're playing with fine margins as the min wage would have only cost about 300k/yr per team.

Making money wasn't the main priority for most of the CHL owners. Instead, it was about supporting their community and their love of sport made them willing to tolerate a certain level of losses. As fil noted earlier above, this is the difference with Canadian soccer as there are much less Canadians who deeply love the sport. And those who do and have enough disposable monies have invested more outside of Canada than in Canada.

I will also add that London made the final 12 cities list that PWHL was considering for their original 6 teams.

Edited January 6 by red card

[BigBadBorto]

Thanks for this information.  I didn't know it was all settled.  Very surprising that half the teamsare losing money..  Also quite a huge valuation spread between Calgary and Swift Current.   The $2m per year per team for Univerity tuition can't be accurate though..  That would mean about nearly $100k per year per player if all players were going to University.  Tuition ranges from $10-$20k per year for most undergrad universities in Canada

[SpursFlu]

Not really following along but I think the CHL should elevate their top 20 teams across Canada and make it a pro league. Have a CHLPro & CHLJr

[Colonel Green]

21 hours ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

I'm not going to claim expert inside knowledge on junior hockey but to turn this around another way if a junior hockey franchise is drawing 4000 on average for around 34 home games at an average of $20, you are looking at revenues of around $2.7 million before you even get into other game day revenue streams like concessions and merchandising which judging from any time I have been at a Knights game will be significant.

CHL franchises don't generally own the arenas they play in, so things like concessions revenue wouldn't necessarily be going to them.

Which also goes to another difference, namely, that almost every large-ish community in Canada habitually maintains a venue suitable for a CHL team, which as we've seen is definitely not the case with soccer.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

That last bit is a big part of why both the KPMG report around the year 2000 and the Easton Report in 2013 came to the conclusion that conditions were not ripe for a relatively high budget coast-to-coast air travel league like CanPL to be successfully launched. Will be interesting to see what happens with the soccer stadium proposal in Halifax.

[BearcatSA]

2 hours ago, Colonel Green said:

Which also goes to another difference, namely, that almost every large-ish community in Canada habitually maintains a venue suitable for a CHL team

Or CEBL team.

[nighttrain]

The EPL & Championship by geography, occupy the approx same space as all of southern Ontario up to Sudbury, maybe Timmins. The VFL in Australia started off in Victoria (hence the V) but over time expanded across Oz. So as much as I applaud the CPL for starting off coast to coast, for a "CPL", the actual baby steps would have been to start local. 10-12 Ontario teams (throw in Quebec too) and you've got a strong base for travel and the fans.

Edited January 20 by nighttrain

[Stoppage Time]

1 hour ago, nighttrain said:

The EPL & Championship by geography, occupy the approx same space as all of southern Ontario up to Sudbury, maybe Timmins. The VFL in Australia started off in Victoria (hence the V) but over time expanded across Oz. So as much as I applaud the CPL for starting off coast to coast, for a "CPL", the actual baby steps would have been to start local. 10-12 Ontario teams (throw in Quebec too) and you've got a strong base for travel and the fans.

OK, but you need:

- owners that will bankroll a team through the early, get established days;

- markets that will embrace a team with around 3,000 to 4,000 paid fans per game even when the teams is bad for a year;

- a sound arrangement for these teams to be able to sell on players to higher level leagues;

- a way to keep the image from such a league from appearing amateur.

The Swangard era Vancouver Whitecaps were a good model for this with four to seven thousand per game, a supporters club, an opportunity to stand behind the opponent's goal and heckle the goalkeeper (Hey, chicken legs! - You came all this way just to lose, just to lose!), and a stadium that did not look empty during games.

I think that the CPL needs a transportation sponsor (Air Canada or Westjet) to subsidize travel although Cavalry already has Westjet so there may be conflict of interest. 

I would love to see each of the major banks/credit unions in Canada take on one team and have a CEO contest for annual championship bragging rights with a $10 each dollar bet pool, winner takes all.

There is my two cents worth for today.

 

[Bison44]

7 hours ago, nighttrain said:

The EPL & Championship by geography, occupy the approx same space as all of southern Ontario up to Sudbury, maybe Timmins. The VFL in Australia started off in Victoria (hence the V) but over time expanded across Oz. So as much as I applaud the CPL for starting off coast to coast, for a "CPL", the actual baby steps would have been to start local. 10-12 Ontario teams (throw in Quebec too) and you've got a strong base for travel and the fans.

I think what your talking about is L1O and it already existed before the CPL....sooooo....whats the next step after that??  

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

8 hours ago, nighttrain said:

The EPL & Championship by geography, occupy the approx same space as all of southern Ontario up to Sudbury, maybe Timmins. The VFL in Australia started off in Victoria (hence the V) but over time expanded across Oz. So as much as I applaud the CPL for starting off coast to coast, for a "CPL", the actual baby steps would have been to start local. 10-12 Ontario teams (throw in Quebec too) and you've got a strong base for travel and the fans.

Trying to impose European style league models on a relatively sparsely populated North American scale geography with a niche interest level sport has always been a major stumbling block for the D1 Canadian league concept. 

The league that could have been Canadian soccer's VFL was the NSL in the Windsor-Quebec corridor that ran from the mid-20s to mid-90s. The CSA and Dale Barnes in their infinite wisdom chose to try to displace it rather than work with it when the CSL was launched in 1987 and that alienated a lot of potential fans. Leagues that came later like the CPSL and L1O were and are a case of local amateur soccer pretending to be something it's not for the most part.

Personally think it doesn't take too drastic a shift in CanPL's economic model to be able to accomodate more reasonable travel schedules for most of the teams using regional conferences while still maintaining national branding. Losing $125 million over the first five years of operation doesn't appear to have dampened the enthusiasm of the CSB investors that are still on board with ploughing on with the approach that they have been using, however.

The problem for Canadian soccer is what happens when reality finally dawns on them that their long term investment play isn't going to work and be a cash bonanza for them in the manner they envisaged like it eventually did with the Fath brothers in an FC Edmonton context who also had close to a decade of NASL involvement prior to CanPL.

[nighttrain]

“to accomodate more reasonable travel schedules for most of the teams using regional conferences while still maintaining national branding“. I agree

[nighttrain]

11 hours ago, Bison44 said:

I think what your talking about is L1O and it already existed before the CPL....sooooo....whats the next step after that??  

I’m just saying that shoulda woulda coulda been the natural progression to a country wide league. 

[Aird25]

19 hours ago, nighttrain said:

The EPL & Championship by geography, occupy the approx same space as all of southern Ontario up to Sudbury, maybe Timmins. The VFL in Australia started off in Victoria (hence the V) but over time expanded across Oz. So as much as I applaud the CPL for starting off coast to coast, for a "CPL", the actual baby steps would have been to start local. 10-12 Ontario teams (throw in Quebec too) and you've got a strong base for travel and the fans.

I don't understand this desire to re-write history. We have a great league with clubs representing fantastic cities from coast to coast, and it only seems to getting better. If the league had folded because of Covid I could understand it, but why go backwards now?

Edited January 21 by Aird25

[phil03]

1 hour ago, Aird25 said:

I don't understand this desire to re-write history. We have a great league with clubs representing fantastic cities from coast to coast, and it only seems to getting better. If the league had folded because of Covid I could understand it, but why go backwards now?

Because in exchange we have our federation being in a financial crisis when both of our national programs when they should be in golden ages of their own.

Like, I have personally come around to grudgingly accept that something like the CSB deal was needed (altough I still have beef with the specific terms) since we can't function with three clubs eternally, the Yanks didn't want to give us the access to their pyramid we would have needed to function only through them and the geographical challenges coming with running a fully Canadian professional league. I also think having a regional league would defeat the whole purpose, since what we want are clubs covering most of the country geographically so we won't let talents fall through the cracks because there isn't any professional club close to home.

However, I also think that its unsurprising that people will keep questioning the league and its organisation as long as it is connected with pain for our national programs and that they will keep daydreaming of way we could have done it without that pain, or at least with less of it.

That's what the CPL signed up for when the owners agreed to the CSB deal, I am affraid.

Edited January 21 by phil03

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

58 minutes ago, phil03 said:

..., the Yanks didn't want to give us the access to their pyramid ...

Not true. The only significant issue at the time the moratorium was announced by the CSA was that the USSF's D2 and D3 league sanctioning conditions only allowed a certain percentage of clubs from outside the United States but waivers to those conditions could potentially be obtained.

Tony Waiters was hired by the USL to help push Canadian expansion only a few months before Victor Montagliani announced that it was now verboten. One of the interested groups was FC London. Well over a decade on pro soccer in London, Ont is still in don't hold your breath territory because of CanPL's more stringent stadium expectations.

Something something escalating franchise values though.

[SpursFlu]

2 hours ago, Aird25 said:

I don't understand this desire to re-write history. We have a great league with clubs representing fantastic cities from coast to coast, and it only seems to getting better. If the league had folded because of Covid I could understand it, but why go backwards now?

Because people are trying to create a narrative the the CPL doesn't work and can't work. Even though it can work and does work

I feel like I'm eating a steak while someone is telling me you can't order a steak in this restaurant and it's impossible to eat a steak in this restaurant. Maybe the objective by some is to ruin my meal and get people to stop ordering the steak

[SpursFlu]

23 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

Not true. The only significant issue at the time the moratorium was announced by the CSA was that the USSF's D2 and D3 league sanctioning conditions only allowed a certain percentage of clubs from outside the United States but waivers to those conditions could potentially be obtained.

Tony Waiters was hired by the USL to help push Canadian expansion only a few months before Victor Montagliani announced that it was now verboten. One of the interested groups was FC London. Well over a decade on pro soccer in London, Ont is still in don't hold your breath territory because of CanPL's more stringent stadium expectations.

Something something escalating franchise values though.

Nobody cares. You're boring and living in the past