There’s big money to be made from our insatiable appetite for the Leafs, Raptors, Jays and TFC. That’s why the competition in the broadcast booth is getting just as heated as any athletic contest. A report from multiple battlefronts in Toronto’s fiercest media war—TSN vs. Sportsnet.
The sheer volume of the weekday lunch-hour rush at Real Sports Bar and Grill, the palatial Maple Leaf Square watering hole just steps away from the Air Canada Centre, is a reminder of one of this city’s most fundamental truths: Even when they’re supposed to be working, Toronto’s coveted 18–34 (mostly male) demographic simply longs to sit around drinking beer and arguing about sports. On a daily basis, this 25,000-square-foot man-cave, decked out with its 112 taps and 199 screens (tuned into every conceivable athletic event on the planet), is ground zero for some of the most pressing debates of our generation—like whether the Leafs screwed up the Phil Kessel trade or whether the Raptors’ Andrea Bargnani will ever learn to grab a rebound.
Despite a rather glaring lack of recent reasons to cheer, the city’s twenty- and thirtysomething sports fans are intensely, stubbornly, often pathetically loyal. It’s a quality that makes them the target in the current battle between TSN and Sportsnet—a contest predicated on the belief that such loyalty will extend from a team logo to a sports network. It’s a fierce, Toronto-based media war that’s redefining the way Canadians get their sports coverage. And in a country that puts hockey imagery on its currency, that’s kind of a big deal.
Toronto’s last great media war was waged over a decade ago, with Conrad Black’s National Post defiantly taking on the Globe and Mail in the battle for national-newspaper supremacy, a war that effectively ended when Black waved the white flag and sold his pride and joy in 2001.
The bout between Sportsnet and TSN kicked into overdrive after the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, a watershed moment for Canadian sports in which the two companies joined forces to form Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium. Though the partners reportedly lost money on their $153-million venture, the fan hysteria that surrounded the Vancouver games proved that the opportunities presented by today’s multi-platform media landscape are a branding goldmine that makes the Globe and Post’s print scuffle look very much like a relic of a bygone era.
Since Sportsnet and TSN are prime content factories for their respective telecom giant owners, Rogers Communications and Bell Media, the sports-media arms race stretches out across television, the internet, mobile apps, radio and, in Sportsnet’s case, a glossy new bi-weekly magazine (appropriately called Sportsnet) featuring Stephen Brunt, the much-celebrated sportswriter who was lured away from the Globe earlier this year.
In case you haven’t noticed, over the past decade, sports networks have largely ignored middle-aged sports buffs and become geared very directly at guys in their 20s and 30s who were raised in the ADD-centric worlds of gaming and pop video. Fast-paced game-highlight reels are now accompanied by generic up-tempo rock by the likes of Nickelback, analyst panels have been beefed up to include sound bites from three, four and even five talking heads and UFC (exceedingly popular among virile young bros) has become a prominent part of the programming.
Toronto may have recently been named the “Worst Sports City in the World” by ESPN, but the packed tables at Real Sports are proof that mediocre teams haven’t made our city’s audience any less rabid for the games they love. And with rabid fandom from this extremely desirable demographic comes an avalanche of disposable income that makes advertisers salivate.
Most significantly, in the age of PVR, Netflix and instantly downloadable torrents, sports is the last realm of entertainment that demands to be consumed live, ideally in a massive throng of equally passionate supporters. And if you’re watching it live, you can’t skip through the ads.
All of which means TSN and Sportsnet are fighting over a giant pool of money, each focused on being the first-choice outlet for a generation who vote every time they place their fingers on a remote. This could get ugly.
Next page: How Sportsnet became more than just TSN’s little brother
