It was announced today that the Canadian Football League came to an agreement for a 'partnership' with the CBFA, a Brazilian football organization responsible for several tiers of football in that country. In the last couple of years or less, the CFL, at the direction of it's commissioner - Randy Ambrosie - has been making deals and partnerships with other 'football' leagues around the world, including those in Germany, Japan, and Mexico.
It is in my opinion that this could be a very slippery slope for the CFL and Randy Ambrosie, and shouldn't be the focus of a Canadian league that is looking to beef up the game here at home first and foremost, There are several glaring problems with this new initiative, which I will go into detail about right now.
1) Canadian players. Finding talent from other countries might seem like a good idea, but it's not. Roster space has been increased for import players as of late, while roster space for domestic (Canadian) players has either stayed the same, or decreased. More emphasis needs to be placed on developing Canadian players from the CIS university program, which also needs to be upgraded. How many more Canadian-born players do we need to lose to American programs?
2) League problems. Nothing much has happened in Halifax yet to get a stadium built and finally have a tenth team in operations. If and when this happens (and we here at TTS hope it does), we'll have an actual cost-to-coast league we can be proud of. There is also the fact that a couple of teams have attendance issues, those being the B.C. Lions and Toronto Argonauts. This needs to be addressed first and foremost, especially in Toronto.
3) History repeats? Remember the last time the CFL tried to go beyond it's means? In something we will never, ever talk about except in this paragraph, the CFL went bonkers and tried that massive U.S. expansion that was a total bust (save for the Stallions). It was a bad idea then to expand and grow the league outside of Canada, and it's a bad idea now. This isn't the NFL with it's billions of dollars and care-free attitude. This is the CFL, which isn't rich, but gets by on home-grown affection from it's fans here in Canada, as well as it's rich history.
The CFL needs to end this international nonsense here and now, and Ambrosie needs to smarten up else he'll go down as the worst commissioner in the history of the CFL.
Agree or disagree? Leave a comment below!
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