A work stoppage is still at least a few days away for the Canadian Football League and its Players Association, but one Edmonton Eskimos super fan is already affected.
Matt Machado is the face of Section O on Twitter, a group of passionate fans who occupy their namesake at Commonwealth Stadium, where they cheer on the Eskimos, wage Twitter battles with rival fans and help prop up beer sales for the team for every home game. A 12-year season ticket holder — impressive considering he’s 26 — Machado and his friends’ lives revolve around the CFL schedule.
“Me and my buddy Jay (Ferguson) got the idea to do one big trip a year, other than Labour Day because anybody can go to Labour Day,” Machado said of the quick trip to Calgary.
“What we tried to do is try and plan one big roadie each year and the only stadiums we have left are Ottawa and Montreal.”
They’ve booked their tickets every winter, as soon as that season’s CFL schedule was unveiled.
This year?
“We want to go to Ottawa, but we’re slowly holding off because we don’t want to get caught with non-refundable airfare. We’re still holding, but the longer it goes, it doesn’t look like it’ll be happening.
“It’s a shame because on a small scale, it’s four tickets not being purchased for the new Ottawa team. But out of principle, on the big scale now, you have this apathy.”
When someone like Machado, someone who can’t remember the last time he worked on a Sunday in November; whose good friend planned his proposal to his girlfriend around a trip to the 100th Grey Cup in Toronto, starts talking apathy, the CFL and the CFLPA should worry. These are the fans you don’t want to stress with the standard sports CBA rhetoric. These are the fans the CFL needs. These are the fans the CFL are starting to lose.
“(The CFL) had a brilliant off-season campaign with Twitter: #IsItJuneYet? And over the course of the winter you forgot that there were no labour negotiations (taking place) and it felt like it was the same as any other winter,” he said.
“Fans, I felt were more hyped up than ever. You have a new Ottawa team coming in, you have a new stadium in Hamilton, you have the biggest demographic in the CFL in Saskatchewan coming off a Grey Cup. Now nobody’s talking about that anymore, nobody’s hyped.
“There’s the big elephant in the room, which is an asterisk attached to everything the CFL tweets out, or any other fan base tweets out, a big asterisk: Pending negotiations. They buried it. In two days (of both sides publicly negotiating) they buried what it took six months of momentum to build. And both sides share the equal amount of culpability in this issue.”
While he has empathy for the players, who gave up revenue sharing in their 2010 negotiations with the league, and who are seeing money spent around them in new stadiums and money coming in through TSN’s five-year, $42 million annual deal. He wonders, though, about how much the players can gain in a strike, how much the league will bend in the weeks ahead. He wonders about the damage that the process could do for the league as a whole.
“It’s like First World War warfare,” he said. “You’re going to move 400 yards but the entire battlefield is blown up. That’s the course of action that I feel we’re headed toward right now.”
The sad irony to all of this, Machado points out, is that the Eskimos will vote on whether or not they should strike on Saturday, which is also the Eskimos annual fan day. Alberta Labour Laws require 72 hours’ notice from the time that votes are tabulated before a strike can commence. The Eskimos and the CFL could be on strike as of Tuesday, June 10.
The Eskimos’ first pre-season game is scheduled for Friday, June 13, with the B.C. Lions visiting.
Machado will attend fan day, though this year is the first one that had him considering other options. He’ll join a friend’s stag party out of town this weekend, though his Section O counterparts didn’t make the same decision.
“What’s happening with negotiations now is it’s creating a sense of apathy, it’s creating a sense of, ‘I’ll just find something else to do,’ and the CFL can’t afford that. Both sides can’t afford that.”
As the seemingly inevitable draws closer, Machado’s left frustrated and waiting.
“I plan my work schedule around the Eskimos. The shift I have now I maintain it because it gives me my weekends off. I book my holidays around the team. Ask my girlfriend what I’m like in the off-season. I’m just an irritated mess.”
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