There’s a number sales orgs love to obsess over: talk-to-listen ratio. Every call intelligence platform on the market will happily tell your reps they talked 62% of the time and should aim for 43%. It’s treated like a swing thought - say it enough times and the behaviour fixes itself.

But talk ratio is measuring how much someone talked. It says nothing about what they talked about.

Here’s the ratio that actually predicts whether a fan renews, a sponsor re-ups, or a season-ticket member upgrades: how much of the call was about them — their season, their kid’s first game, the seat complaint from March, the trade they’re still mad about — versus how much was about you. Call it the relationship ratio. And most clubs are full of representatives who are failing it without knowing it, because they’re passing the metric that gets measured while flunking the one that gets remembered.

The best rep in the building isn’t the best pitcher

Every sales floor has one. The rep whose renewal numbers make no sense given how little they seem to “sell.” They don’t have the slickest deck or the tightest close. What they have is recall. They open the call by asking about the surgery the customer mentioned three months ago. They remember which kid plays travel ball and which one quit. They know this account got burned by a bad parking experience two years ago and therefore they never bring up parking without acknowledging it first.

That’s not charisma. That’s a working memory for other people’s lives, preferences and stories… deployed on command, at scale, across dozens of accounts. But it is scary: it’s not really a skill you can train into someone. You can train a pitch. You cannot train someone to care enough to remember forty different people’s forty different lives.

What you can do is stop making memory the bottleneck.

Does sales training optimize for the wrong things?

Most onboarding and coaching still centres on message — objection handling, value prop delivery, competitive positioning. All useful. None of it is why people renew. People renew because they feel known. The research on this isn’t subtle:

relationship-driven retention consistently outperforms feature- or price-driven retention,

especially in categories (like live sports) where the emotional stake is the entire product.

So your org spends its coaching budget sharpening the pitch, while the actual driver of loyalty - being remembered accurately, consistently, over years - gets treated as a personality trait (“Shona is really good at that”) instead of a process. It’s the equivalent of a football team drilling the passing game every single day and never once practicing situational awareness, then wondering why they keep getting caught out of position.

This isn’t a hunch

It would be easy to wave at “relationships matter” and call it a day. But the claim holds up under more scrutiny than that. A 2020 meta-analysis in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science - pooling over 1,200 effect sizes across more than two decades of services research - found that the personal, confidence-building, and social elements of a customer relationship are the strongest drivers of loyalty, and that they work specifically by improving perceived value and relationship quality. Not price. Not features. The relationship itself is the mechanism.

There are two different claims sitting next to each other, and only one of them is really proven. The research says relationship quality drives loyalty - that part is well-established across decades of services marketing. What it does not say is that measuring relationship quality, on its own, improves it. That second step is a reasonable inference, not a documented finding: organizations generally get more of whatever they choose to track (what gets measured gets done), so if recognition is the thing that actually predicts renewal, tracking it should surface more of it. But that’s management logic applied to a marketing finding, not a marketing finding in its own right - I figured I should point that out but I believe the logic holds.

Either way, the foundation isn’t a hunch. The relationship ratio isn’t a made-up metric dressed up to sound scientific - it’s a name for something the research has been converging on for forty years, applied to the one setting, sports, where the emotional stakes were always going to make the effect loudest. In fact I think the logic applies to any situation where a) the lifetime value is high, and b) the setting is emotional or grounded in a person’s identity.

So the relationship ratio applies to sports properties, golf clubs, alumni associations, etc.

Key moments aren’t small talk. They’re the whole relationship.

There’s a tendency to file “remembering the kid’s name” or “asking about the knee surgery” under small talk - the warm-up before the real conversation starts. That’s backwards. For a fan or a member, the relationship is the small talk. The renewal conversation, or the upsell, or the service call, is just paperwork on top of it.

Think about what actually gets remembered from a good doctor, a good hairdresser, a good bartender. It’s never the technical execution — you don’t remember your dentist’s cavity-filling technique. You remember that they asked how the move went. The technical competence is assumed; the memory is the differentiator.

Sports orgs sit on an enormous advantage here that most industries don’t have: emotion is already baked into the product. Nobody cries about their CRM renewal. People cry about their team. That emotional surplus is a gift — if the rep can actually access what happened last time, and the time before that, and use it.

Everybody wants to be Norm

Think about why Norm Peterson goes to Cheers every single day. It’s not the beer — he could drink at home for a fraction of the price. It’s that the second he walks through the door, the whole bar says his name. Someone already knows his order. Someone already knows his mood before he says a word. He is seen, on arrival, without having to re-explain himself. That’s the entire show in one sound cue.

That’s also the entire renewal thesis in one sound cue. Nobody is loyal to a bar. People are loyal to being known by name at the bar.

Fans build this for themselves when the organization doesn’t. I heard about season seat holders from the old Maple Leaf Gardens who threw a barbecue every summer — not for family, but for the people who sat around them, section after section, year after year, plus the ushers who worked their aisle. That’s a group of strangers who became a found family because of proximity to the same fifty square feet of arena, several times a season, for years. The organization didn’t build that. The fans built it themselves, out of the same instinct that sends Norm through the door every night.

Soccer clubs have formalized this better than almost anyone, through supporters’ groups —> organized, self-sustaining communities built entirely around belonging to something bigger than any single seat. Smart clubs don’t just tolerate supporters’ groups, they support the supporters: they show up, resource them, treat them as a retention channel rather than a nuisance to be managed by security.

The lesson underneath all three examples — Norm, the Gardens barbecue, the supporters’ groups — is the same. People don’t need the organization to manufacture belonging out of nothing. They need the organization to notice the belonging that’s already trying to happen, and stop being the reason it doesn’t reach them. A rep who forgets who you are is functionally the opposite of a bar where everybody knows your name.

The memory problem

There is a memory problem that every club is aware of but doesn’t know how to deal with: even your best rep, the one with the elite relationship ratio, cannot hold forty accounts’ worth of “kid’s name, surgery, parking complaint, trade grudge” in working memory forever. They’re doing it through sheer will and a system of sticky notes and CRM fields nobody else reads. It works until it doesn’t — until they take a vacation, get promoted, or leave, and the account gets handed to someone starting from zero. And your best reps are the ones who get hired away.

Whose memory is it, anyway?

When that rep walks out the door, so does the memory. The kid’s name. The parking grudge. The barbecue invite list. Years of exactly the intel that made the relationship ratio work … gone, not because the customer forgot, but because the organization never knew it in the first place.

That intel was never the rep’s personal property. It was generated on company time, in company conversations, with the club's own members — the club is part of that relationship, not a bystander to it. So it's strange that most orgs would never let a departing rep walk out with the CRM export, yet they think nothing of letting them walk out with something far more valuable: the actual texture of those relationships. Every “how’s the knee,” every “I know you’re still mad about the trade,” every detail that turns a transaction into a Norm-at-Cheers moment - is in a file cabinet in your service rep’s head, and then lost the day that head leaves the building.

We’ve been treating this as an acceptable cost of doing business for decades. It isn’t a cost. It’s a slow, silent leak of the exact asset that determines whether people renew. The skill isn’t rare because it’s hard to teach. It’s rare because no one built the infrastructure to make it belong to the company instead of the individual.

Which means the real lever for an org isn’t “hire for empathy” — you can’t scale a hiring filter, and you can’t retain what you never captured. The lever is capturing the memory as it’s created, so it survives every transfer, every promotion, every departure — so that every rep can open a call sounding like the one who’s been paying attention for three years, because the relevant history is sitting in front of them instead of buried in someone else’s head, on someone else’s way out the door.

That’s not a coaching problem. It’s an infrastructure problem wearing a coaching problem’s clothes.

This nuanced idea is so important to the long-term health of every sports organisation’s seasoned member base, and so overlooked that we have created a tool, Tandem, and set of processes to ensure that your club retains all of the personal relationship data, and ensures that it doesn’t live in any one rep’s file cabinet in their head. I really know this niche - if this is interesting to you, please reach out. This is a solvable problem.

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The Leafs released single-game tickets this week, and the reaction has been what you’d expect: two hundred dollars for a nosebleed on a random Tuesday in December, standing room going for more than the price of a decent dinner, and a wave of fans doing the math and declaring that they are being priced out. The question everyone reaches for is the obvious one: are the Leafs too expensive? And it can’t be answered, because it assumes all fans are the same fan. Nuance? in Sports? Grab a chair.

They aren’t. And before we start, before you remind me that the Leafs have not won a Stanley Cup since ‘67:

there is no correlation between what a team charges and how it’s performing.

The price isn’t a verdict on the product; it’s a reading of demand. Which means increases in price really ask each fan a question they’ve never had to answer before - how much is my fandom actually worth to me? or what does my fandom cost me? - and the answer depends entirely on who that fan is.

But this post isn’t about the Leafs. It’s about fandom.

So let’s talk about who the fans are. Because every fan is carrying two ‘numbers’, not one, and almost the entire business of sport comes down to reading both.

The two things every fan has

The industry has always sorted fans along a single axis: avidity. Casual at one end, diehard at the other. We price against it, market against it, and build our whole mental model of the customer on it. And it’s real - avidity absolutely matters. But it’s not the only measure.

Avidity is where the club sits on a person’s priority list:

• For the diehard and the season ticket holder, their club lives near the very top - food, shelter, transportation, my team, in roughly that order.

• As you move down the avidity spectrum, the club slides further from the top of the list, until you reach the person who’ll come if their friends are going and the weather’s nice.

Easy to understand, and easy to measure - avidity reveals itself. It wears the jersey.

But avidity only tells you how much a fan wants to spend. It says nothing about how much they can spend. And that second number is the one nobody plots.

Disposable income is capacity - the amount of room a person has in their life to act on their devotion. And a person’s capacity to pay is independent of avidity. A fan can love the club with their whole heart and have no money to spend on it. Another can have enormous capacity and rank the club somewhere below their fourth streaming service. Willingness and capacity are two different variables, and the money in this business lives precisely where they intersect.

Cross the two, and you don’t get a spectrum. You get a map.

The four quadrants

Four quadrants, four completely different customers — and the industry misreads most of them.

High avidity, high income - the Sweet Spot. Loves the club and has the capacity to act on it. This is the whole game, and it’s a smaller cell than anyone likes to admit. These are the people to surround, to know by name, to give more ways to spend that feel like belonging rather than extraction.

High avidity, low income - Devoted but Stretched. All the love, none of the room. This is the fan the pricing conversation is really about. They rank the club near the top of their priority list - often above things a financial planner would weep at - and the club has learned it can charge rent on that devotion. They’ll pay, by sacrificing elsewhere. They are simultaneously your most loyal fans and your most exploitable ones, and how you treat them is the whole test of whether you’re building something or, well, harvesting it.

Low avidity, high income — Untapped. Plenty of capacity, but the club isn’t high enough on their list to unlock it. This is the cell the industry is worst at, because our instinct is to reach for a discount - and a discount is aimed at a wallet problem. But these people don’t have a wallet problem. You don’t win this fan with a lower price. You win them by raising their avidity: occasion, experience, belonging, a reason to move the club up their list. The corporate buyer, the newcomer to the city, the lapsed fan. Focus on price and you devalue the whole thing.

Low avidity, low income — Casual / Priced Out. Good for atmosphere and future potential, not a revenue strategy today. Worth keeping warm, because people move.

The industry does it exactly backwards

An awkard pattern emerges

The business systematically

• over-monetizes the top-left - squeezing the loyal-but-stretched, because they’ll bleed for the club and we know it - and

• under-invests in the bottom-right, ignoring the affluent-but-indifferent because they don’t already love us.

It does the two precisely backwards. And the reason is almost mechanical: avidity is visible and capacity is invisible. We can see who loves us: they’re wearing the scarf, they’re in the same seats every night, they answer every email. We cannot see who can afford us. So we price against the emotion we can measure and miss the money we can’t, and we end up leaning hardest on exactly the people least able to bear it, while the people who could easily spend more never get a reason to.

That $200 Tuesday nosebleed is the purest example of the error. It’s a club looking at its most devoted, most captive fans and deciding to extract the maximum, because they’ve confused loyalty with capacity. The love is real. The room to pay for it is running out. And those two things are not the same.

The map is not static — the axes move

Now for the part that turns this from a tidy diagram into something alive, and something urgent right now.

The crossing point of those two axes isn’t nailed to the centre of the page. It represents the typical fan - the median avidity and median capacity everyone else is plotted against - and it slides with the economy. As it moves, the four quadrants breathe. One swells while another collapses.

In a boom year, the whole population drifts up and to the right. Money feels safe, discretionary spending feels safe, and the Sweet Spot balloons. More people can afford to act on devotion they already have. That’s the year every marketer looks like a genius, because the optimism and market did the work for them.

And then there’s a year like this one. A housing crisis. Inflation that won’t fully sit down. Grocery bills climbing faster than anyone can remember. And an employment number that reads as “healthy” in the business pages while feeling super precarious at the kitchen table. In a year like this, the crossing point slides down and to the left, and the quadrants distort in a way that should frighten anyone running a pricing model built in the fat years.

The Sweet Spot shrinks —> fewer people sit in “loves it and can afford it,” exactly the cell your upside revenue depends on. The Devoted-but-Stretched cell swells — same love, less room, a bigger and bigger group feeling the pinch every single time they say yes to you. And avidity itself softens under pressure, because when the dollar is thin the club slips down the priority list - not because anyone loves it less, but because rent and groceries are non-negotiable and the club, painfully, is not.

Which is why raising prices to the top of the market in a down year feels off. It’s a timing error. You’re raising the toll on the bridge in the exact season more people can’t afford the crossing. You capture more from each of the fewer who remain, and you quietly accelerate everyone else’s drift toward the exits - and these days, there are a lot of exits. The CPL, the PWHL, the Northern Super League, the CEBL, the WNBA: cheaper, closer to home, (sometimes) more Canadian, and in many cases a whole family can have a great night out for the price of one $200 seat. A downturn doesn’t just make your tickets harder to afford. It actively pushes your stretched fans to go looking… and trial is how loyalty starts to move.

A caution I learned the hard way

I should tell you how I know this, because I got it wrong.

In 2008, the world economy fell off a cliff, and Canada felt it too. But I didn’t. I was gainfully employed, in an industry that wasn’t dramatically taking the hit, sitting comfortably, if I’m honest, right in the middle of the Sweet Spot. And from inside that corner of the map, the decisions we made at Toronto FC in 2008, ‘09 and ‘10 were based on the world I could see from where I stood.

I, we, failed to really understand the life our fans were living.

The uneasiness they felt about their jobs - if they still had one. The tenuousness of employment for the very people who were our season ticket holders. I could have read a business report telling me the fundamentals were fine, and I probably did. What I couldn’t do, from my own square on the map, was feel what they were feeling.

That’s the trap, and it’s worth calling out plainly for everyone in this business: your own dot doesn’t move. You read the whole map from wherever you happen to be standing, and if you’re standing in the Sweet Spot, the Sweet Spot looks a lot bigger than it is. The business report will tell you employment is healthy. It will not tell you that your longest-tenured member just took a pay cut and is painfully deciding this is the year they don’t renew. For that, you have to get out from behind the dashboard and into the world - into the pubs, the parking lot, on the bus, on the concourse, the reply to the email - and actually listen to what’s happening in people’s lives.

Hope is a luxury good

So the message for the highly paid business analyst, the CFO and the owner:

When money gets tight, the first thing people ration is discretionary belief. Hope is a luxury good, and in a lean year it’s the luxury that gets cut first. Which means a downturn is precisely the moment your Devoted-but-Stretched fans are most at risk - not because their love failed, but because they can no longer afford to act on it.

So the clubs that will still be full a decade from now are the ones that treat a downturn as a moment to protect affordability for their stretched-but-loyal fans, rather than harvest them. Hold the line on those people through the lean years, and you keep them inside the tent until the crossing point rises again and their avidity can finally convert into spending. Harvest them - squeeze the maximum while they’re most vulnerable - and you’ll find that when the good times return, a meaningful chunk of that fan base simply never came back. They’d already found their new Tuesday night somewhere down the road, for a quarter of the price, and discovered they liked it there.

There’s a bunch of Forge FC and Inter Toronto FC fans who will back me up on this.

That’s the real cost of reading the map wrong.

The better question

So the question was never “are the tickets too expensive?” It can’t be, because there is no single fan to be too expensive for.

The real question - the one that should inform every pricing, marketing, and sales decision in this business - is: which fan is this, on both axes, in this economy? Get that right, and the strategy writes itself. Stop squeezing the top-left. Go earn the bottom-right by raising avidity in people who can actually afford to act on it. And in a hard year, protect the devoted-but-stretched like the irreplaceable asset they are, because loyalty spent in a downturn does not come back at the same price.

Avidity tells you who loves you. It was never going to tell you who can afford you. And a business that only reads half the map will always, eventually, find itself charging the most to the people with the least - right up until the day they’re gone.

---

A model like this is a lens, not a dashboard — nobody has clean data plotting every fan on both axes at once, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed they did. But you don’t need perfect data to change how you think. You need to stop assuming the fan who loves you most is the fan who can most afford you. Helping clubs see their base on both axes - and price for the year they’re actually in, not the one their spreadsheet was built in - is a lot of what I do. It usually starts by getting out of the Sweet Spot and going to listen.

Cory Doctorow has given us one of the better words of the last few years: enshittification.

His 2025 book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, develops an argument he’s been making for years about how digital platforms evolve. Platforms begin by creating enormous value for users. Then, as users become dependent on them, some of that value gets shifted toward the businesses that need access to those users. Eventually, once both sides are sufficiently locked in, the platform starts clawing the value back for itself.

It’s a wonderfully rude word for a fairly sophisticated economic idea. And Uber is a useful place to start — because we should give Uber its due.

Calling a taxi used to be shit. You stood on a street corner and hoped one came past, or you called dispatch and were told one was ten minutes away, which could …

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My experience as a sports parent through my two kids meant we did a little bit of everything: soccer, Irish dancing, rock climbing, paddling. My daughter grew up around sport, mostly because I dragged the kids to it, but her own vocabulary - the lens through which she sees the world - was built much more through fiction, pop culture, music and story.

So when she became involved with Pride House during the World Cup here in Toronto, two parts of my life unexpectedly intersected.

Pride House Toronto was created as a safe and welcoming space for queer supporters and was led by people I had first met years earlier as Toronto FC supporters. I loved that connection. What I didn’t expect was that Pride House would be the thing that helped turn my daughter into a sports fan.

She got pulled completely into the World Cup. Over the past few years she’s also been to A…

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Sports organizations have spent the last two decades becoming obsessive about marginal gains. Sixteenth-of-a-second improvements in a changeover. Sleep tracking. Grip strength. Recovery windows built into a training calendar down to the hour. The entire discipline of sports science exists because someone decided that a 1% incremental gain was worth pursuing — and it turned out to be where championships were actually won.

Sales and Service departments in the same buildings have never applied that discipline to themselves. They still measure the sport with a microscope and the department with a stopwatch that only starts when the call connects an…

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On the night of March 24, 1996, a basketball game that meant absolutely nothing sent thirty-six thousand people into a delirium usually reserved for a championship. I remember it vividly. We thought we’d won it all!

The expansion Toronto Raptors — 17 and 49, in their very first (shortened) season, playing out the string in a cavernous domed stadium built for baseball — beat the Chicago Bulls. Not just any Bulls. Michael Jordan’s Bulls, who walked into SkyDome at 60 and 7, on their way to 72 and 10 and an NBA title, arguably the greatest team the sport had ever assembled. Final score: Toronto 109 – Bulls 108.

Damon Stoudamire, Mighty Mouse, went for 30 points and 11 assists and hit six threes. Jordan had 36. And it came down to the final possession, with Doug Christie draped over the greatest closer who ever lived, knowing - the way the whole building knew - that the ball was going to Jordan and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Christie contested. Jordan got a shot to the ri…

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The idea in this piece didn’t come from a book. It came from a doorway.

When the Air Canada Centre was still going up - the building that’s now Scotiabank Arena - the Leafs purchased the Raptors and the still-under-construction ACC.

It was a tumultuous time. The Leafs had actually proposed that they locate their New Maple Leaf Gardens in the airspace above Union Station. They went so far as to say the site of the Raptors new arena could be converted to a bus station.

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In the early days, “game operations” was less a department than a collection of people saying, “Sure, I can probably do that.”

Oliver Miller was standing at the free-throw line, the Raptors were down by one, and there were only seconds left in the game.

Oliver was huge—a very large, very tall and very intimidating man. From my little audio perch he may have been hundreds of feet away, but this did not make him feel safely distant. It merely gave him more runway.

And this was the exact moment I decided to become clever.

From my little audio perch high inside the SkyDome, I had been waiting all season for the perfect chance to use a sound clip I had tucked away in the computer. Oliver had been fouled and was going to the line for two shots. Two shots. Two tickets. The connection seemed irresistible.

I found the button and pressed it.

“I’ve got two tickets to paradise…”

There was, however, a small problem with running game music from the SkyDome: I was so far from the court that sound had to ap…

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I’d rather be debating Taylor Swift’s wedding (where are the pics??) or tracking (the world’s first former trillionaire) Elon Musk’s net worth. But the Substack gods — and football’s governing suits — have forced my hand.

When FIFA announced its latest scheme to consolidate and privatize its commercial operations, UEFA fired back with a line for the history books:

“It is not FIFA’s to sell. None of us are the owners of football.”

It’s a magnificent piece of rhetoric. It sounds like a romantic defense of the public commons against corporate enclosure — the village green protected from the private gatekeeper.

But UEFA desperately needs a mirror. Because while they preach civic stewardship from their lakefront headquarters in Nyon, they operate the exact same commercial monopoly they claim to despise.

The European Court of Justice saw right through the performance in 2023, explicitly ruling that UEFA held an unlawful monopoly and abused its dominant position to strangle competition. And whil…

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Right now, across basketball and hockey, we’re in the dog days.

It is difficult to create urgency in the off season. Inside the organization, reps slow their pace of calling, and they sound calmer on the phone. Outside, the season is over. The next schedule hasn’t been released. Decision-makers are at the cottage or on a beach somewhere.

The urgency that fuels the department in February has completely drained out of the calendar. Fewer deals are closing. The phones are quieter. And in ticketing offices everywhere, a familiar frustration is setting in - for reps and managers alike - because the activity just feels different. Slower. Softer. Like nothing is happening.

Although sometimes cordial conversations don’t feel like work, and even feel like they are getting in the way of work… but let me try to convince you: this is when the most valuable work of the entire year gets done. It just doesn’t look like work, which is exactly why so many organizations waste it.

The dog days are where you…

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That’s the tell. A value that never forces a difficult choice isn’t a value. It’s décor.

So here’s a more direct test, taken from a small number of clubs that actually pass it: a value is real when it closes off an otherwise attractive option. You need to be seen to be living by your values, no matter the cost.

Run that test across professional sport and you find three genuinely different ways an organization can end up standing for something — and a fourth, much larger category of clubs that never decided at all, and got a reputation anyway.

1. In the Club Constitution: the belief is written into the operating rules

The strongest version of standing for something i…

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It’s deadline day. There are some accounts still sitting on the fence — one is a really good one, a long-tenured one — and the rep working it is this close to their renewal bonus. The email lands, and it’s so reasonable you can barely feel the trap closing:

“Can I get one more week?”

“I just need to check with my partners.”

“Can you hold my seats while I decide?”

“I want to see what you do this off-season first.”

And so the club bends. The deadline slides a few days. The seats get held. A small favour gets granted to a good customer. On the surface it looks like exactly the kind of flexibility that keeps a valued relationship warm.

It’s one of the most expensive things a ticketing operation can do, and almost nobody counts the cost — because the cost doesn’t show up on the account you accommodated. The cost is one of a thousand cuts to every other season member.

A deadline is a promise to everyone else

When you set a renewal deadline, you’re making a promise to the eighty-eight percent of …

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When I left the Ottawa Senators for Brighton and Hove Albion, the offer looked right on paper. English Football League club, a serious role, a chance to work at an ambitious club with someone I respected inside one of the most prestigious football leagues on the planet. The number in the offer letter was the number in the offer letter. I said yes.

What I had not done carefully enough was the actual calculation. The currency conversion. The UK tax structure. The cost of living in the south of England. The distance from the support systems — family, friends, the particular kind of familiarity that makes a city feel liveable rather than just inhabited. I took a pay cut that was more than I had fully appreciated when I signed, and I discovered the gap the way most people do: by living inside it rather than modelling it in advance.

I am not telling this story to complain about Brighton, which is a beautiful place, or about the opportunity, which was a highlight of my career and my family lif…

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The largest soccer audience this continent has ever assembled will watch the World Cup final, and then Monday will arrive and everyone will go back to work. For a few weeks after that - maybe a few months if we’re lucky - there will be kids in every town who want a jersey, and parents who suddenly want somewhere to take them to a local game.

I wrote earlier about what clubs should be doing right now to hold onto that momentum. But small clubs are small, overworked, stretched thin, and…Somebody has to actually do it.

And at the overwhelming majority of clubs in North America, that somebody is one person. One person who is the sponsorship department, and also the activation department, and also the person who checks whether the LED board is running last week’s creative. The biggest commercial window in a generation just opened, and the person responsible for climbing through that window spent game day running around looking for an extension cord for a concourse activati…

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Every wave of ticket-resale legislation is written with the same villain in mind: the professional broker, the high-speed bot, the flipper hoovering up inventory to dump it back at a markup. Fair enough. That world exists and it deserves scrutiny.

Today’s news is full of examples of these villains, whether it’s FIFA or some of their national federations, or the CEO of StubHub. The reality is ticket prices are skyrocketing, and these villains give a target for fans to focus their anger.

But the rules that get written to catch that villain keep catching someone else entirely — the single most valuable customer a club has. And in the process we’re making them nervous, treating them with suspicion, and turning them into a criminal in their own minds. They are not the villain. They might be the most important person in your building.

I’m talking about the season ticket holder. And to understand why the villain framing is so badly misplaced, you have to look at what a season seat has actually…

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There is no point reading an organization’s stated values. None. A mission page, a code of conduct, the “values” section of an annual report — these documents are written to be read, not lived by. If you want to know what an organization actually believes, watch what it does when decisions come with consequences.

I know that claim sounds absolute, so let me complicate it slightly, because I’ve also been inside the process that produces these documents and it isn’t always cynical.

Early in my career, at the Raptors, the organization ran the standard exercise — an off-site meeting, a facilitator, lunch included — and it produced a vision and values statement. One of the outputs was a small card, one for every desk in the building. Plenty of people rolled their eyes at it, the way people reasonably do at laminated corporate form destined for a drawer. I asked our CEO about it once, half-expecting him to defend the process. He didn’t defend the card. He described what it was for. Paraphrasi…

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The Canadian Soccer Association had been promising a domestic cup competition for years. They kept promising. Nothing came. So Dwayne Cole, a Winnipeg-based Voyageurs member who had been the group’s informal chief fundraiser since they’d first shown up at a Canada match with two banners in 1996, posted on the message board and asked people to chip in. Donations arrived from across the country — a few dollars here, a few hundred there — until somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000 had accumulated. Cole commissioned a trophy at a shop in his hometown. A handled wine cooler, solid brass, electroplated in sterling silver, mounted on a base of lacquered Canadian oak set with die-cut aluminum maple leaf plates. An oak travel case built to protect it on its journey back and forth across the country, though as it t…

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On the same day, Rogers also announced it had completed its buyout of the remaining partners in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, making it the sole owner of the most valuable sports and entertainment portfolio in the country.

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For six matches this June, BMO Field was “Toronto Stadium”. The world came.

Portugal fans filled the streetcars. Germans and Croatians shared bar tables. Ghanaian flags flew from car windows in Rexdale, Iranian ones in North York, Argentine ones on College. Kids are kicking balls in parks where I haven’t seen kids kick balls before. The city ran with a hum I’ve only felt a few times in my life — a version of Toronto entirely at ease with itself.

The tournament is still going, but Toronto’s part is over. This week, workers begin pulling out the temporary seats. FIFA branding comes down. In a few days, Toronto Stadium will be BMO Field again.

What stays?

I keep coming back to that question, because a few months ago, in the same city, a very different conversation began.

A System Coming Apart

This spring, the Future of Sport in Canada Commission released its final report, Transforming Sport in Canada: Time for Action, with 98 Calls to Action and a blunt conclusion. The Canad…

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Sports organizations have spent the last two decades becoming obsessive about marginal gains. Sixteenth-of-a-second improvements in a changeover. Sleep tracking. Grip strength. Recovery windows built into a training calendar down to the hour. The entire discipline of sports science exists because someone decided that a 1% incremental gain was worth pursuing — and it turned out to be where championships were actually won.

Sales and Service departments in the same buildings have never applied that discipline to themselves. They still measure the sport with a microscope and the department with a stopwatch that only starts when the call connects an…

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