An unlikely contender

Kingston making noise about a CanPL bid

Photo by Larry Farr on Unsplash

Two by 2026.

CanPL Expansion teams, that is. That’s the promise league CEO Mark Noonan has made to fans. Just one year out and with little news of legitimate candidates out there, it seems ambitious.

The truth is that Noonan might not have much choice but to make it happen now, even if he has to be a little more flexible than he and the league has so far wanted to be. There are starting to be voices around the league questioning whether he’s done enough to increase the league’s profile and to attract new investors/expansion franchises. Perhaps that is unfair — it’s a tough sell to get Canadian investors to bite at anything, this country is famously risk -adverse — but that doesn’t make the pressure any less real.

One way you might speed up the process is to look beyond the obvious markets. Everyone understands that the league wants into Montreal and back into Edmonton. The failure of the Saskatchewan bid is an open sore that they’d like to heal. However, there are only so many rocks you can kick. If there’s no interest then there’s no interest. Try to grow elsewhere and hope the momentum gathers from there.

Last year one such market started to emerge in Kelowna, B.C. That got people thinking about what other smaller markets might be able to get a bid together, but it also underlines the biggest obstacle that any potential expansion market faces — where are they going to play?

Getting the stadium right is vital. Soccer teams in North America with bad stadium deals fail. That’s pretty much a universal truth. So, the league is right not to bend on this requirement (albeit, you can question where stitched lines on a pitch constitutes “bad” in the contexts of needing to expand in Canada).

The bottom line with Kelowna remains build it and they will come, just as it always was.

This week noise started to emerge from an even more surprising place in Kingston, Ont. Most interesting about this latest news is that the city’s mayor is pushing for it, with a stadium plan already in place.

This all sounds great. I have questions.

Kingston isn’t just a small market, it’s tiny by professional sports standards. It is the 24th largest market in Canada with just 172,500 people. As importantly, it’s not particularly close to any other markets of note (Belleville would be the only other CMA within an hour’s drive, with 111,000). So, you’d need really good buy-in from the locals to draw what you’d need and pretty much complete buy in from what corporate community is there.

Let’s not completely dismiss the idea of a (very) small market making it work (it’s an intriguing idea, actually), but let’s also be realistic about the challenges.

The biggest question, however, is the stadium plan. It’s coming out of left field and it’s hard to understand what the use case is for a stadium build in Kingston, a city that already has a stadium — Richardson Stadium, home of Queen’s University. It’s all a bit…random.

Bluntly, it also seems a little too “real estate play” as well. it smells a lot like the Saskatoon plan — great looking drawings. Not so great financing plans.

This week I had several contacts from the area reach out to me, all bullish on the plans. One suggested that the rumour is that there’s “a billionaire” is behind the push.

I want to be clear that I’m not anywhere close to believing that, but there are people in Kingston who are excited.

As for those close to the league, for the most part they are as taken aback by the news as the rest of us.

“It’s the first I’ve heard of it,” was how one person reacted. It’s not a market that has ever been spoken about in any significant way, is the general message.

However, there wasn’t a complete dismissal of the idea either. The same “first I heard of it” voice followed up with “but if they build a stadium, (the league) will listen.”

They need teams, after all. Two by 2026, in fact.