National Football League in Toronto - Potential Roadblocks

Potential Roadblocks

Despite these inroads, many commentators consider NFL expansion into Toronto unlikely for the foreseeable future. The biggest roadblock is the league's determination to place a team in Los Angeles, which NFL official Eric Grubman calls "one of our top goals". According to some commentators, unless there are financial or political roadblocks in LA, this focus on Los Angeles will likely override any prospects of moving into Toronto.

The Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts currently play in the city and have in the past been protected from American competition. The World Football League intended to place a franchise in Toronto known as the Toronto Northmen, but then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau threatened to pass a Canadian Football Act to prevent such a move. The WFL backed down and moved the team to Memphis, Tennessee, where it became known as the Memphis Southmen and later the Mid-South Grizzlies in a failed bid to join the NFL. (However, there were no complaints when the same league briefly moved the struggling Detroit Wheels to London, Ontario, which had no CFL team at the time, and still does not.) American teams that have made their home in Toronto include the Continental Football League's Toronto Rifles (1965–67, founded as the Quebec Rifles in 1964) and the Arena Football League's Toronto Phantoms (2000–02, founded as the New York CityHawks in 1997 and, incidentally, owned by Rogers during its time in Toronto). The Rifles, too, faced resistance from the CFL, as the Argonauts signed Rifles coach Leo Cahill, quarterback Tom Wilkinson and running back Joe Williams a few weeks into the 1967 season, forcing the team to fold. Any NFL team that entered the Toronto market would have to deal with the Argonauts as well as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, who play in nearby Hamilton, Ontario and have vehemently opposed any presence of the NFL in Canada.

The Tiger-Cats responded to the Bills' move to play games in Toronto by making an April Fool's Day mock announcement on April 1, 2008 that they would move one of their home games against the Montreal Alouettes to Ralph Wilson Stadium (even though the playing surface at that stadium is too small to accommodate a CFL-size field), and would play the Bills in a rematch of their 1961 contest, which the Tiger-Cats won, in June 2008 (when the Bills would be in minicamp and the Ti-Cats would be playing preseason). Former NFL receiver Oronde Gadsden even went further and suggested in February 2009 that a CFL expansion franchise be placed in nearby Rochester.

Another major issue would be the stadium. Although Paul Godfrey believed that the Rogers Centre could be home to an NFL franchise, it is unclear if the Rogers Centre could be a long-term home. Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome), a retractable roof stadium, has a maximum capacity of 54,088 when configured for CFL games; in comparison, although the Centre's capacity is above the NFL's 50,000-seat minimum, it would still be the smallest capacity stadium in the league, since the smallest NFL stadium in terms of capacity (excluding the exhibition-only stadiums in Canton and Honolulu) is Chicago's Soldier Field, which has 61,500 seats. While extra seats could be added near the end zones as a result of the shorter NFL field (an NFL exhibition at the SkyDome in 1995 fit almost 55,800 fans into the stadium), a large-scale expansion would be very difficult because of the stadium's design. This means that a new football specific stadium would have to be built. Then-mayor David Miller, has stated that funding for a new stadium would not come from the City of Toronto and would have to come from private sources. Counteracting this small capacity is the large number of luxury boxes in the stadium, which count as "unshared" revenue in the NFL's revenue sharing and collective bargaining agreements.

In 2011, the new mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, stated he favored an NFL team in Toronto, although he also ruled out public financing for a new stadium. He and brother Doug Ford, a member of the Toronto City Council, plan on presenting a proposal to league owners regarding the potential relocation of either the Jaguars or the Saints to Toronto, with the intention of relocating another team to Los Angeles and building a larger stadium in Toronto. This would cause serious problems for Buffalo, since not only would it possibly lose its Canadian fan base, said loss would render Buffalo nearly incapable of supporting an NFL team such as the Bills. Unless the Bills were the team to relocate to Los Angeles, there would be few relocation options for the Bills if two teams, not including the Bills, were to take the Toronto and Los Angeles markets. It would also be virtually impossible to contract the franchise (the last attempt to do so in a major league, the Montreal Expos in 2002, was rejected by the players' union), leaving the league in the awkward situation of having to maintain a team without an NFL-caliber market to place it. Incidentally, the largest market outside of Toronto and Los Angeles without an NFL team is Montreal, which has an NFL-capacity stadium and a natural rivalry with Toronto but a history of tepid support of football (as evidenced by the failure of the CFL's original Montreal Alouettes as well as their successors, the Concordes) and a complicated relationship with the rest of English-speaking North America; although a large portion of Montreal speaks English, it is the only city in the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec with a sizable Anglophone population, and the province as a whole has an active separatist movement seeking to withdraw from Canadian confederation.

Another obstacle would be the willingness, or ability, of players from the US to play and live in Canada, which has been a cautionary lesson from other non-NHL sports leagues based in Canada like the NBA and MLB. The Toronto Blue Jays and Toronto Raptors have had several star players in history demand to be traded away or leave outright. More importantly, players that have previously been convicted of crimes can be banned from either the United States or Canada, which would affect roster moves (for instance, the 2011 Bills Toronto Series game was originally rumored to be against the Philadelphia Eagles before it was realized that Eagles quarterback Michael Vick, a convicted felon, would not have been allowed into Canada to play the game).

Ted Rogers, the man responsible for leasing the Bills from Ralph Wilson for the Toronto Series and considered a leading contender for landing a Toronto NFL franchise, died in December 2008 at the age of 75. The lease was transferred to Rogers' company, Rogers Communications, in which Rogers had held a majority stake. Corporate ownership is forbidden under the league's ownership policy, which would not allow the company to buy the team outright.