CFL 2020 season canceled – All bets are off

19 August 2020

It’s official: There will be no 2020 CFL season.

The CFL Commissioner’s office announced the cancellation of the entire 18-game regular season and Grey Cup playoffs on Tuesday, August 17, which would have been the exact midpoint of the 20-week 2020 season. For those sick NFL bettors who can stand to restrain themselves from betting on professional football for the eight weeks before the NFL even kicks off – the news is irrelevant. After all, the 2020 NFL season is full steam ahead, and nothing will cancel the games short of a fresh outbreak of Covid-19 on top of the first wave of Covid-20 plus the Earth actually cracking in half to release a horrible planetoid-sized Cthulhu-like Destroyer of Worlds.

In fact, from a purely NFL-centric standpoint, the cancellation of CFL 2020 unleashes about 225 American players – and about the same number of Canadian players – to serve as backups for the inevitable players lost to positive coronavirus tests.

For those of us who dig on Canadian football and/or CFL betting, however, this hardly surprising news is cause for concern. The reason why the large U.S.-based sports leagues can afford to shorten the season, play games before empty stadiums, even enact a bubble environment is because of billion-dollar TV deals. The CFL, along with professional sports leagues, likesay, the American Hockey League and even the again-defunct XFL, are dependent to a (very) large extent on ticket sales.

Indeed, with three markets in which weekly sellouts are far from guaranteed – Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal – and the league cemented into second-best within its sport, the CFL had been running in the red well before coronavirus was doing its work. Back in early May, CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie went before a Canadian House of Commons committee to request bailout money, a request ultimately denied

At that time, Ambrosie admitted that the league was looking at $30 million in debt – interestingly just about the same amount former CFL aspirant Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson paid to get XFL 2.0 out of hock – going into the would-be 2020 season and would need $120 million more to keep the league going in ’21 and beyond.

It’s that “and beyond” which is the truly scary bit. In the dog-eat-dog capitalistic pro sports universe of North America, few charitable bailouts exist for a failing franchise – and no league has ever been granted a bailout. Yet this is the situation the CFL finds itself in today. Though nearly all of the league’s nine franchises have deep, entrenched histories with their communities (the Toronto Argonauts, for example, is the longest continuously run sports franchise in North America), the intertwined public/private partnership such as those enjoyed by European sports clubs doesn’t exist in Canada. On the other hand, the CFL wants to portray itself as a major-league enterprise like the NFL, but without the lucrative advertising sales, business partnerships and, yes, tv contracts that bring in billions.

The recent closures of the ultimately fly-by-night AAF and XFL 2020 were hardly surprising and will ultimately be little more than a footnote in sports history, but the Canadian Football League is nearly as old as its home country itself. The Canadian Football League goes back to a period before the sport was clearly delineated from rugby, never mind decades before the forward pass was developed. And all of it could go poof thanks to incongruities of mid-level pro sports in the 21^st century.

This is a sad day in all of sports, and worse yet may be a harbinger for North American sports in the next decade.