on Friday\u2019s show<\/a>. \u201cWhen he first got in here his mandate was easy, right? It was grow the game, get the CFL out of neutral and just sort of bring it into the lens in which people consume entertainment in this day and age.<\/p>\n\u201cAnd I think that it\u2019s obviously the most significant media deal that the Canadian Football League\u2019s had. You\u2019re talking about revenue but more importantly you\u2019re actually repositioning the league to be consumed by the way audiences consume sports these days.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way we consume sports and media and everything has changed completely. So for us now as a league to be aligned with sort of a modern content system is fantastic news. It’s a step towards the growth and sustained revenue and partnership that Stewart Johnston was brought in to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mullinder emphasized that, importantly, the incoming rights deals retain TSN as the centrepiece while adding partners that will help the game reach new and younger audiences.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou’ve got streaming through DAZN. You’ve got TSN, which is the backbone of Canadian football, which will always be important … but YouTube really sort of ties it in together because now you have content, now you have creators getting involved in the game. Now you have different sort of shows popping up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike nobody watched F1 before the F1 show came out on Netflix. Now you got these kids running around wearing Ferrari hats so I think that it’s great for the league because again it’s just a step in the in the right direction in terms of the way people consume our game or want to consume sports these days, but also obviously building into the league revenue-wise.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s exposure and revenue Mullinder says he hopes will benefit the league in multiple other ways as well. That could include everything from attracting increased investment in the league and an enhanced viewer experience on Replay Centre reviews, to the possible elimination of the league\u2019s football operations salary cap, and a substantial increase in player salaries.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just hope that this will raise the league minimum (salary), not just the maximum of which our superstar players like Kenny Lawler are getting,\u201d said Mullinder, who played 112 games for the Roughriders over eight seasons from 2004-11.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I’m glad Kenny Lawler got paid. But the point is there’s a lot of guys that are out there grinding. I really hope that this gives them a bump in salary versus just our top-end players.\u201d<\/p>\n
It all adds up to what Mullinder sees as a long-overdue modernization of how the CFL presents itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cI completely get in today’s economy folks not wanting to invest in another streaming service, but … unfortunately it’s just the way things have evolved and either the league aligns with the way things have evolved or they stay here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike we have to understand we’re now going from a very unique, although mom-and-pop organization or shop, \u2014 like we only had one broadcast partner and you’ve got a gate driven revenue, so we’re a small scale league \u2014 to now completely modern.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow can you argue with that, right?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It’s just the way things have evolved and either the league aligns with the way things have evolved…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[49,48,521,522,520,82,256809],"class_list":["post-706471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cfl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canadian-football-league","tag-canadianfootballleague","tag-cfl","tag-sports","tag-tsncflluc-mullinderdazn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}