Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
You aren't paying attention. One of the teams that will jump them in revenue generation did so on the back of a new arena and a sweetheart of an arena deal. Public funding is a requirement for building arenas and stadiums in Canada, especially in the smaller cities. Private funding has proven to be a failure for anyone who tries it, with one exception. The only privately funded arena in Canada that has not gone bust and forced a sale of the team is the ACC. Toronto is kind of in a unique situation, having a population five to eight times the population of Calgary, and also having a naming rights deal that paid for the construction cost of the arena many times over. Think on that. The naming rights paid for three Air Canada Centres, with change left over. And the Flames have to find a way to compete with revenue opportunities like that?
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I don't buy that for a second. If you actually bothered looking at the detail, Gillette sold the team in Montreal but it had nothing to do with the Bell Centre(very lucrative indeed) and Montreal's population(1.7 vs 1.4) is not that much more then Calgary. Indeed, Gillette bought the Canadiens for 185 and sold them for around 600 million, it worked out great for him and payed off in spades, again the Bell centre is an argument for a private investment actually paying off.
Edmonton is really the exception here and it was always a government town reliant on taxes.