Having lived with the travails of the Toronto Maple Leafs for over three losing decades, it has reluctantly been a labour of love.
Growing up, you would have to tear me away from the TV on Wednesday and Saturday night watching the Leafs on TV with my dad. Now, with more demands on my time and more disenchantment with the cycle of losing and shoddy style of management, even I could go weeks on end without watching a game.
Apparently I'm not alone.
According to the Toronto Star, fewer people are calling themselves "big Leaf fans," and fewer kids are taking up the sport for either monetary or cultural reasons.
Tom Anselmi, executive vice-president and chief operating officer of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment candidly mused. "The Leaf fan is aging and is being replaced." Now that MLSE the parent company has basketball and soccer on their side, the ethnic and aging drift of the sports fan can be mitigated but this is Toronto, self-proclaimed centre of hockey in the world.
Like most big league sports now, the Maple Leafs, in pursuit of short term profit, are pricing themselves out of most audience sgements, even though they have a waiting list of 3,000 names for season tickets, worrisome trends exist about hockey registration, immigration and Internet use, which are all working against the long term vitality of the Leafs.
Shocking stat - fewer fans (51 per cent in 2007-08 compared to 69 per cent in 2006-07) describe themselves as "big" fans of the club. The Leaf fan is about five years older than a Raptor fan and less ethnically diverse.
With half the citizens of Toronto are new Canadians and by 2018, half the city being classified visible minorities, the sport will have to adopt a lot more Wongs, Mandelas, Romeros and Gandhis into what historically been a domiant white circle.
The Leafs are countering by:
- refurbishing between five and seven arenas a year
- sponsoring equipment drives to help underprivileged kids play the expensive sport.
- growing their Internet and digital presence will grow, with more games online
- hosting more practices will be open to the public, many in neighbourhood arenas.
- the team will use a lottery to sell the 500 or so tickets per game to keep them away from scalpers
So if you were running the Leaf empire, what would you do?
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