Hello Bernard,

I'm quite sure that your frustrations are shared by a great majority of the football community however, the blame for our collective woes can not be placed entirely on the shoulders of the CSA. And on that note I'd like to take two exceptions to your letter.

Firstly, the perpetual sponsorship dilemma is to some degree out of the CSA's hands. Certainly they should be doing a remarkably better job at promoting teams, events and the entire football industry, and the means to do such comes of course with huge wads of cash traditionally bled from numerous sponsors yet, the supporting infrastructure for such is related directly to the exposure given the CSA by our collective media.

To stress the point, I'll give you one million dollars for the 'team' if you can promise me that the team, and my brand, will be all over the place, and furthermore, the event will be first and foremost on the public's mind. That means regular, enthusiastic coverage in our newspapers, our radio shows, our TV broadcasts and everything in between. Everything it takes to convince Canadians that this is the goods, the real deal, an event one simply can't miss.

Well we don't have that commitment do we. Canadian media generally doesn't give a toss about football, and  certainly doesn't go out of its way to hype the cause, not even remotely to the same degree it hypes hockey and all those wonderful American sporting institutions like baseball and American Football. I'm talking not just about paid promotions but also the sort of free wheeling advertising most hockey teams (shit or not) get from radio DJ's who spent entire programs chatting hockey this and hockey that. The quantity of page space newspapers grant the Canucks even during awful times is not directly related to incoming advertising dollars but rather to the notion that everybody loves hockey in Canada and everyone is interested in reams of articles, photos, senseless chat, etc. The truth is that not all of us give a toss, but sooner or later it's part of everyone's consciousness because we simply can't avoid hockey news.

It's like a great big machine that feeds on a few ad dollars, then pumps out dozens of promo materials that in turn convinces a dazed public that this is 'the thing' to covet. That public in turn creates a feeding frenzy that drives more ad dollars and more promo. In regards to hockey at least, the machinery is virtually self-sustaining and clearly one of the easiest jobs in advertising is to convince a potential advertiser that they should place their ad in the sports section, amongst hockey articles, commentary, player profiles, team analysis etc etc.