Costly losses

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/11/2015 (3606 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lost amidst all the losing this season has been how much all this losing on the field is going to translate into losses off of it.

Is that enough references to losing for you in one paragraph? Well, this is the Winnipeg Blue Bombers we’re talking about and losing happens to be their particular area of expertise.

Here’s what we know for sure: Bombers fans frustrated by a championship drought that as of this year is now being measured in quarter centuries are voicing their displeasure loud and clear this season by sitting on their wallets.

First, they stayed away from Investors Group Field in droves during a dreadful regular season that sees the local professional football team limp into its final game this week in Toronto with a woeful 5-12 record.

And now, those same local CFL fans are refusing to buy into a Grey Cup game at the end of this month that is going to see a team other than the Bombers occupy the home dressing room at IGF.

The Bombers provided their first Grey Cup ticket sales update in months on Tuesday, announcing they’ve sold 32,054 tickets thus far. With less than a month to go before the big game, that’s still over 4,500 seats short of a sellout for a game that even if it sells out — and that’s a big ‘if’ at this point — would be the second smallest Grey Cup since 1975.

Remember, the Bombers originally intended to build a second temporary grandstand for this year’s Grey Cup that would have boosted capacity to over 40,000, but the club announced a couple months ago they’d scrapped that idea because “the league” told them they needed the space in the second endzone to accomodate a halftime show that was announced Tuesday as the American rock group, Fall Out Boy.

Whatever the original reason, the shrunken capacity now seems fortuitous, saving the Bombers the embarassment of even more potentially empty seats at IGF at the end of this month — a sight this club has already become all too familiar with this season.

The Bombers drew a total of 240,713 spectators to Investors Group Field over the course of nine home dates in 2015, an average of 26,746 per game.

That’s a 5.5 percent decrease over the 28,294 spectators the Bombers averaged in 2014 and a whopping 12.7 percent decrease over the 30,637 per game the Bombers averaged in the inaugural season of IGF in 2013.

But perhaps even more worrying is this year’s attendance is also lower than even the final two seasons the team played at old dilapidated Canad Inns Stadium — and is the lowest this team has generated since a 4-14 season in 2010.

Exactly what is the lower attendance this season going to do to the Bombers bottom line? That’s impossible to know without knowing exactly which tickets — and at which price point — weren’t bought this season.

What we do know is the Bombers recorded a $3.9-million operating profit in 2014, but that operating profit did not factor in Winnipeg’s $4.5-million annual mortgage payment on the new stadium. That means that even with higher attendance in 2014 than this season, the Bombers still had almost $600,000 more in expenses than revenue last year.

This year’s decline in attendance is the continuation of a nasty downward trend for a team that has very little room for error in a yearly budget that requires that big mortgage payment every year on a shiny new football palace that increasingly has a lot of empty seats.

And it’s precisely because those margins are so thin that it was so important this year’s Grey Cup be a huge success. Bombers CEO Wade Miller told the Free Press earlier this year that the club was hoping to turn a profit of at least $5 million from hosting this year’s championship game, a windfall Miller hoped would provide the team some financial breathing room for years to come.

But that profit target was formulated before the Bombers and the CFL shrank the stadium and before a woeful regular season had them struggling even to sell a reduced number of tickets.

Throw in the steep decline in regular season ticket sales in 2015 and what has become clear is that yet another debacle of a Bombers season on the field in 2015 is going to come with very serious financial consequences for a community owned team that the community appears to be increasingly turning its back on.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek