The NHL is coming closer to Quebec City

[ericmacm]

I don’t consider CPL, CEBL or the NLL to be relevant in this discussion right now, since the leagues still have a lot of catching up to do regarding arena size, attendance, and prominence in the North American sports media market. All are still risky regarding league stability. I want to keep it to B4/B6 because these leagues are recognized as major institutions. The CPL still has a long way to go before it becomes equivalent to the MLS, which will never expand in Canada again.

I am aware of the state of the CPL and where it’s expanding but it’s still a small league. The CPL has a lot of potential market share to grab in these neglected cities, and this is highly visible in Halifax and Victoria. They will gain a major footing with ease, and I am looking forward to it because it’s been a long time coming. The way I see it is that these markets are the CFL’s to lose since the MLS doesn’t care about Canada, and the Big 4 are not interested in our smaller cities. If the CFL actually cared about its long-term viability, it would be trying to snatch these markets up right now. I suppose there’s not much they can do though, especially when they are failing to reach the eyes of younger generations and the stadiums are significantly more valuable than the teams that play in them.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by JHikka

I'd rather Wanderers Grounds over Moncton's stadium. Better location, better stands, more intimate.

It's weird to be critical of a city as 'can't-do' when you're simultaneously casting doubts on existing plans for stadium expansions.

Also the Metro Centre isn't the best arena in Atlantic Canada. I think you're conflating best with largest.

The Moncton Stadium is better than the Wanderers Grounds, no question. It has permanent stands and the pitch is the latest FIFA standard.

I will grant however that the Wanderers Grounds are more intimate and better located.

As for hockey arenas, the Avenir Centre in Moncton is newer and more luxurious than the the Scotiabank Centre in Halifax. It is also not that much smaller than the Scotiabank Centre either (8,800 seats vs 11,000 seats).

[craner]

Delete.

[craner]

Originally Posted by JHikka

Also the Metro Centre isn't the best arena in Atlantic Canada. I think you're conflating best with largest.

^I believe he is saying the new arena in Moncton is the best (not the Halifax Metro Centre).

[The Great Scaper]

We got burned here in Victoria. They built a new arena here in 2005 with only 7000 seats. A million people live on Vancouver Island and that's what we got. I hate the arena too. I always thought that they could have built something around 12,000 seats and could have got an AHL team and a farm team for the Canucks. So sad. Maybe one day Langford (municipality) will build one.

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

The Moncton Stadium is better than the Wanderers Grounds, no question. It has permanent stands and the pitch is the latest FIFA standard.

We'll agree to disagree. Moncton Stadium is basically equivalent to York Lions Stadium - it just happens to have a stand on the opposite side of the field.

Originally Posted by craner

^I believe he is saying the new arena in Moncton is the best (not the Halifax Metro Centre).

I did read that wrong, didn't I?

This will show my bias but I think Harbour Station is a better arena than Avenir Centre. Equivalent location (HS access can be exclusively indoor), better visually, better design with multi-tier, cleaner box design, better concourse design. Everything at ice level is better in Moncton, such as offices and dressing room, but I think as a fan attending an event Harbour Station is a better experience. Avenir is very whelming.

[someone123]

I don't really have an opinion on what sports teams should go where but I follow some of the projects. I find some of these arguments around say the arena in Halifax pretty weird. If people think an NHL team is impossible there what really justifies spending hundreds of millions on a substantial upgrade?

I wouldn't say Halifax has a can't-do attitude or is obsessed with Moncton. The soccer team there is popular and as JHikka pointed out it seems likely that stadium will be expanded (potential $20M request for public-owned stadium, municipal budget is $1.1B). It's separate from the CFL question. I think the CFL proposals struggle to get funded because they are not good proposals and the proponents want complicated suburban facilities partly funded by the taxpayer. I don't think Halifax is holding Moncton back from having a CFL team. If Moncton can attract a CFL team then great. I'm not sure why we are comparing the Halifax soccer stadium, built for the soccer team there and expanded as needed, to the Moncton stadium. It made perfect sense that they would built a temporary stadium for the Wanderers to try it out and it turns out they have been successful. Much better than the CFL plans IMO.

[esquire]

^ The CPL's expansion model is good in the sense that it lets cities test drive a franchise with a relatively low degree of commitment. You can play in basically a temporary stadium while you gauge whether the level of interest and support merits a more substantial investment.

The CFL, on the other hand, demands money (in the form of an expensive stadium) up front. Maybe that made sense in 1982 but it's a tough sell now. It's not hard to see why people in Halifax, Quebec or Moncton won't take a flyer on a CFL expansion team when doing so means a nine figure investment in a stadium that wouldn't have much use if the football team craters.

I wonder if the CFL should focus less on getting a perfect stadium and more on getting a team off the ground and letting the stadium grow organically with the team. Put a team in Moncton, throw up a few temporary seats to augment the existing stands, and grow it from there. Otherwise another 40 years will pass and the league will be in the same situation that it's in now.

[blueandgoldguy]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

The Moncton Stadium is better than the Wanderers Grounds, no question. It has permanent stands and the pitch is the latest FIFA standard.

I will grant however that the Wanderers Grounds are more intimate and better located.

As for hockey arenas, the Avenir Centre in Moncton is newer and more luxurious than the the Scotiabank Centre in Halifax. It is also not that much smaller than the Scotiabank Centre either (8,800 seats vs 11,000 seats).

Yes, this is what I said. Avenir is better than Scotiabank. And Avenir is the preferred venue in Atlantic Canada.

Wanderers grounds are cheap scaffolding-stands. If they want to build a proper 10,000 seat facility (as opposed to a 20,000 seat facility) for soccer-only they will have to spend $30 million if not more given the massive increase in construction costs. Anything less, it and will likely be a substandard facility.

[blueandgoldguy]

Originally Posted by esquire

^ The CPL's expansion model is good in the sense that it lets cities test drive a franchise with a relatively low degree of commitment. You can play in basically a temporary stadium while you gauge whether the level of interest and support merits a more substantial investment.

The CFL, on the other hand, demands money (in the form of an expensive stadium) up front. Maybe that made sense in 1982 but it's a tough sell now. It's not hard to see why people in Halifax, Quebec or Moncton won't take a flyer on a CFL expansion team when doing so means a nine figure investment in a stadium that wouldn't have much use if the football team craters.

I wonder if the CFL should focus less on getting a perfect stadium and more on getting a team off the ground and letting the stadium grow organically with the team. Put a team in Moncton, throw up a few temporary seats to augment the existing stands, and grow it from there. Otherwise another 40 years will pass and the league will be in the same situation that it's in now.

The trouble with that is that the CFL is primarily gate-driven. YOu would be asking a lot of Moncton citizens to pay an inflated price for CFL tickets in a mediocre facility...no suites, limited concessions and washrooms, half the seats in the endzone and temporary seats at that. Limited advertising opportunities and revenue in a stadium like that as well.

Teams need to be making $1 million on just their gate each game to have a chance at breaking even. A Moncton Stadium with 10,000 seats in the endzone has no chance at accomplishing this. That means the owners would have to be willing to lose millions per year hoping to sustain interest in the product AND hope to secure public funding (likely in the hundreds of millions) in the near future AND/OR hope the other franchises would be willing to subsidize losses for an indeterminate period of time. Good luck to any commissioner trying to corral the interests of the public and privately owned teams into a unified whole on that front.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by blueandgoldguy

Yes, this is what I said. Avenir is better than Scotiabank. And Avenir is the preferred venue in Atlantic Canada.

Really? It is newer and might be nicer but does it typically bring in more in ticket sales? Location is part of what makes a venue attractive, and downtown Halifax is inherently tricky to build developments with large footprints in, so there is an inherent trade-off.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by someone123

Really? It is newer and might be nicer but does it typically bring in more in ticket sales? Location is part of what makes a venue attractive

New and nicer =/= ticket sales.

Scotiabank Centre might bring in more revenue than the Avenir Centre, but the Avenir Centre is only 20% smaller.

The Avenir Centre is also a downtown arena. While downton Halifax is definitely superior to downtown Moncton in terms of aesthetics, the Avenir Centre has already stimulated over $150M of new construction in the immediate neighbourhood since it was built (including two hotels), and I am personally aware of at least two more large scale residential projects planned for the neighbourhood in the near future.. None of this would have happened if the Avenir Centre had not been built.

[blueandgoldguy]

Originally Posted by someone123

Really? It is newer and might be nicer but does it typically bring in more in ticket sales? Location is part of what makes a venue attractive, and downtown Halifax is inherently tricky to build developments with large footprints in, so there is an inherent trade-off.

For non-sporting events? Yes!

[someone123]

Originally Posted by blueandgoldguy

For non-sporting events? Yes!

So the sold out Bryan Adams arena rock show (or whatever) in Moncton brings in more $? What's the source for that? There will be a different mix of events and preferences at the different venues. The question to answer is what the expected revenue is for different kinds of events in the two venues.

I think it could go either way and it's possible for ticket sales in a venue with fewer seats to be higher with a higher price per ticket.

At the end of the day it's academic since it's not really one market. The kind of things that would go to the arena in Moncton or Halifax tend to go to both cities (and often Charlottetown, Sydney, etc.). And there won't be nearly as much support from NS if say a CFL team were in Moncton instead of Halifax. A slight majority of population in the region is in NS and a lot of the growth is going to metro Halifax. This kneecaps prospects for a regional Moncton team to some degree. This is the real Moncton-Halifax frustration.

There's a bit of a weird discrepancy here where an NHL team in Halifax versus Winnipeg or Quebec City is beyond the pale due to a few cold hard numbers but Moncton is presented as on par with Halifax for the CFL for a more subjective set of reasons (e.g. people will flock from around the Maritimes to a CFL game in Moncton but will not drive to Halifax for NHL). If you applied the NHL-style logic to the CFL, Moncton would look a lot worse than Halifax.

I tend to think that people can't predict what will happen 10-20 years from now to a meaningful degree and as of right now the CFL doesn't seem very healthy. I think it is a marginal prospect in Halifax and farther from reach in Moncton. In Moncton you'd have to have about 1/8 of the population showing up to every day to hit average CFL attendance.

[Djeffery]

Originally Posted by someone123

So the sold out Bryan Adams arena rock show (or whatever) in Moncton brings in more $? What's the source for that? There will be a different mix of events and preferences at the different venues. The question to answer is what the expected revenue is for different kinds of events in the two venues.

I think it could go either way and it's possible for ticket sales in a venue with fewer seats to be higher with a higher price per ticket.

At the end of the day it's academic since it's not really one market. The kind of things that would go to the arena in Moncton or Halifax tend to go to both cities (and often Charlottetown, Sydney, etc.). And there won't be nearly as much support from NS if say a CFL team were in Moncton instead of Halifax. A slight majority of population in the region is in NS and a lot of the growth is going to metro Halifax. This kneecaps prospects for a regional Moncton team to some degree. This is the real Moncton-Halifax frustration.

There's a bit of a weird discrepancy here where an NHL team in Halifax versus Winnipeg or Quebec City is beyond the pale due to a few cold hard numbers but Moncton is presented as on par with Halifax for the CFL for a more subjective set of reasons (e.g. people will flock from around the Maritimes to a CFL game in Moncton but will not drive to Halifax for NHL). If you applied the NHL-style logic to the CFL, Moncton would look a lot worse than Halifax.

I tend to think that people can't predict what will happen 10-20 years from now to a meaningful degree and as of right now the CFL doesn't seem very healthy. I think it is a marginal prospect in Halifax and farther from reach in Moncton. In Moncton you'd have to have about 1/8 of the population showing up to every day to hit average CFL attendance.

The difference with the NHL in Halifax and CFL in Moncton and each market supporting the other or not is that the NHL is 4-5 times as many home games. Most CFL games are on a weekend. Far easier to imagine some people visiting Moncton on a summer weekend for a football game than having Moncton people flocking to Halifax in the winter for hockey on a Tuesday. Which, to be fair, there still would be a fair amount that would.

It's really not that hard to imagine regional support for a Moncton CFL team given the same thing in Saskatchewan. And the same arguments are used against an NHL team in Saskatoon as Halifax as far as people travelling in the same masses for hockey that many times a year as compared to football.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by Djeffery

The difference with the NHL in Halifax and CFL in Moncton and each market supporting the other or not is that the NHL is 4-5 times as many home games. Most CFL games are on a weekend. Far easier to imagine some people visiting Moncton on a summer weekend for a football game than having Moncton people flocking to Halifax in the winter for hockey on a Tuesday. Which, to be fair, there still would be a fair amount that would.

I have made this argument before. On average, there is a CFL home game once every two weeks, making it a lot easier time commitment for a casual fan. Football actually lends itself to a small market in this way.

I am not trying to restart the old Moncton vs Halifax CFL wars however. The CFL has made their decision, and they obviously want Halifax in the league. So be it.

It will be a large hill to climb. There are only a limited number of billionaires in the region, and they all seem more interested in making money rather than in vanity projects like a CFL team. Neither provincial government would be interested in backing a CFL stadium, and, the federal government will not fund professional stadiums either. There is a huge funding hole there for a stadium (in either Moncton or Halifax), which I do not see getting filled.

We will still be having this discussion in 20 years time...........

[MolsonExport]

please don't bring up "Can do" attitudes. It is complete bullshit.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

please don't bring up "Can do" attitudes. It is complete bullshit.

Yep. The traditional questions like local population and disposable income are relevant in both cases and there's proportionally a bigger gap between Moncton and Halifax there than between Halifax and the smallest NHL city or prospective NHL city (not that I am saying Halifax will get an NHL team; I'm somewhat indifferent toward it and somewhat against cities spending too many $$$ on sports infrastructure).

We hear about about how Halifax's stadium built for its CPL team is crappy. Moncton does not have a CPL team while the one in Halifax turned out to be one of the more successful so far.

[esquire]

Originally Posted by The Great Scaper

We got burned here in Victoria. They built a new arena here in 2005 with only 7000 seats. A million people live on Vancouver Island and that's what we got. I hate the arena too. I always thought that they could have built something around 12,000 seats and could have got an AHL team and a farm team for the Canucks. So sad. Maybe one day Langford (municipality) will build one.

For what it's worth the SOFMC can be upgraded to a much higher standard. As I said before, it looks like a mini-NHL arena, but its interior is finished to community rink Duncan, BC levels. In that respect it reminds me a bit of Canada Life Centre, which had a very underwhelming interior when first built but was dramatically upgraded after the NHL came to town, including the addition of premium seating areas.

Originally Posted by blueandgoldguy

The trouble with that is that the CFL is primarily gate-driven. YOu would be asking a lot of Moncton citizens to pay an inflated price for CFL tickets in a mediocre facility...no suites, limited concessions and washrooms, half the seats in the endzone and temporary seats at that. Limited advertising opportunities and revenue in a stadium like that as well.

Teams need to be making $1 million on just their gate each game to have a chance at breaking even. A Moncton Stadium with 10,000 seats in the endzone has no chance at accomplishing this. That means the owners would have to be willing to lose millions per year hoping to sustain interest in the product AND hope to secure public funding (likely in the hundreds of millions) in the near future AND/OR hope the other franchises would be willing to subsidize losses for an indeterminate period of time. Good luck to any commissioner trying to corral the interests of the public and privately owned teams into a unified whole on that front.

A million dollar gate equates to 15,000 seats at an average of $66.67 a pop. Or 20,000 thousand seats at an average of $50 per. This would not be a slam dunk for Moncton, but it would not be an insurmountable challenge either. Yeah the Moncton stadium would only deliver the bare essentials... but so what, that's all that stadiums in some of the league's most successful markets delivered until very recently.

The league could step in to help absorb some of the losses since there would be value to the CFL in expanding its footprint from coast to coast, and finally expanding to a 10th team. The league has to do some of the heavy lifting here, it can't just sit there with its arms crossed and demand that a city build them a 300 million dollar stadium or whatever. Maybe the NFL can get away with those kinds of demands, but the CFL can't.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by esquire

A million dollar gate equates to 15,000 seats at an average of $66.67 a pop. Or 20,000 thousand seats at an average of $50 per. This would not be a slam dunk for Moncton, but it would not be an insurmountable challenge either. Yeah the Moncton stadium would only deliver the bare essentials... but so what, that's all that stadiums in some of the league's most successful markets delivered until very recently.

This is another arm of the discussion here that doesn't really make much sense or fit the history and what the actors seem to want.

HRM already pledged to fund a $70M or so stadium a few years back but it was not built partly because it was deemed unsuitable, while Moncton's stadium (which has a track) was originally constructed with a $17M or so budget. The CFL numbers talked about for Halifax are more like at $150-200M+ stadium and the league/promoters seem to be aiming for this. This goes all the way back to the 2000's. This sometimes gets mistranslated into Halifax being unable to build a 10,000-20,000 person barebones stadium like what Moncton has, or there being a cheaper option to put the team in Moncton. In reality the existing Moncton stadium is probably immaterial and if it were easy to get CFL facilities going in Moncton it would be easy in Halifax too.