OUT OF THE TUNNEL: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE RIDER FINANCES

BY: RODPEDERSEN.COM STAFF

The Saskatchewan Roughriders released their annual general report this week. As far as annual general reports go, it was one that if not for a couple of big ticket expenses, could have been an overall positive story. However in the end it resulted in a loss of $210,064 for the 2019-20 fiscal. 

Much of this is due to the $676,000 payment to the CFL to keep the day-to-day operations of the Montreal Alouettes afloat as well as the expenses attached to the now-cancelled 2020 Grey Cup Festival at Mosaic Stadium. The Riders had already spent $222,017. Take that away and there would have been a decent profit. Everyone would’ve gone home happy.

This is the third fiscal year in new Mosaic Stadium and the Roughriders are starting to get their operations down to a science. Their basic operation revenue and expenses would have seen a loss of $46,186 for this fiscal. 

The past two seasons have been buoyed by home playoff games, a decrease in expenses in football operations, and lower administration operations. 

On the revenue side, it’s pretty fixed. The football club can assume around $17-million in ticket sales and just over $7-million in sponsorships. There are two spots where the Riders have seen a hit; the first being the merchandise department.

Gone are the days when The Rider Store hit $9-million in sales like in ‘14-‘15 and it seems like now they will hover around the $6-to-$7-million mark. The Rider Store still turns a profit but it’s minimal for the former Green and White cash cow. Things should turn around with just one store in Saskatoon and two in Regina which should keep expenses down. Also there will be more emphasis on their online store without the cost of running brick-and-mortar outlets.

Second, there has been a weird reduction since 2015 of the dollars coming in from the CFL. This should be pretty fixed with the majority of the money coming from the TSN television contract. Yet since 2014-15 ($4,942,960) it has dropped almost $1-million in 2019-20 at $4,080,207. That’s not a good sign from a league perspective. 

Lastly, the loss of the Friends of the Riders Touchdown Lottery. There was $601,000 raked in in the 2018-2019 ledger and it was down to $70,211 last season. The lottery consistently brought the club around $400,000 every year with some highs and lows.

Now with the formation of the Saskatchewan Roughrider Foundation, the Friends of the Riders Touchdown Lottery is done and everything regarding it has been turned over to the Foundation. 

It is now the Touchdown for Kids Lottery in partnership with the Jim Pattison Hospital Foundation. With profits going to both the Hospital, the Roughrider Foundation and what looks like a small amount to the club.

There is a lot of bookkeeping around the operations of the Foundation which is sketched out in the report. The Foundation is an interesting program with incredible potential for the Roughriders but its long-term benefits are still to be determined.

Overall with the lottery now predominantly a charitable foundation, this will be a revenue the football club will not see anytime in the near future.

Like we said in the beginning, overall this was a positive ledger for the Roughriders and with a little bounce back from The Rider Store and consistent home games, the Green and White train would have kept chugging along.

That gets us to the most concerning line of the report.

Go all the way to the subsequent event entry near the end. It outlines the dark future of the Roughriders and the CFL because of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The key line is, “The ability of the Club to sustain long-term operations is reliant on the ongoing operations of the CFL and the support of the collective fan base”. This is ominous.

Let’s be honest; there will not be a season in 2020.

The Riders have enough in their emergency fund and the ability to dip into other reserves and lines of credit to stay alive. To do this, the foundation of the club will be destroyed. There will be mass layoffs, the football operations will be dismantled, there will be missed or delayed payments and zero cash flow coming in. 

The club would go deep into the red and it would take ten years to recover from this devastation. And this just from an individual club level.

When the Roughriders set their internal year-to-year goals, one of the things that always pops up is the health of the CFL. The Riders would always have it as one of the factors that affects the bottom line. Let’s face it, the Riders are one of the teams that have been able to consistently thrive during the past 10-15 years in the face of a league that has seen its attendance and ratings slowly crumble.

The Riders have been great league partners sometimes to a fault. This isn’t an overall healthy league. It feels like the CFL is living paycheque to paycheque and now with a catastrophe staring them straight in the face, they don’t have the means or the wherewithal to find a way to survive.

If there isn’t a season in 2020 there may not be a league left in 2021.

This returns us to the point that there needs to be strong leadership from all levels in the CFL and right now it just doesn’t feel like it’s there. 

The hundreds of players, staff, front office personnel and anyone connected to the CFL just want to see some sort of solid leadership that will give them hope of any sort.

So after all of the positivity that was potentially there for 2020 and beyond, all of that seems like just a dream now. Let our football nightmare begin.

(RODPEDERSEN.COM STAFF)