The game may be six months away, but the countdown to the next Atlantic Touchdown is on in Moncton.
The Canadian Football League is returning to the city with a regular season game this September.
City officials expect the week-long festival, culminating with the game between the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Montreal Alouettes, will bring in $6 million.
Retailers are already getting gear on the shelves in preparation.
“Hats seem to be the popular thing,” says retail manager Patrick Steeves. “Jerseys are very popular too and even the game T-shirts, the event T-shirts are popular as well.”
But, is there an appetite for a full-time team in the city?
This will be the third time the CFL has tested the Moncton market, and while no corporation has expressed interest in purchasing a team, CFL commissioner Mark Cohon recently said the three-year-old, $20-million Moncton Stadium would need $100 million in upgrades before it is CFL worthy.
“It's only a speculative number, until we actually sit down with the CFL to figure out what kind of changes would be needed to the stadium, we could only guess what the number would be,” says Andre Cormier of Communications Moncton.
The league celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, and as a result, there were no Touchdown Atlantic games because the league didn’t want to take any games out of current CFL cities.
However, Maritime fans have supported the week-long event in the past.
The 2010 game sold out and in 2011 all but a few hundred tickets were purchased.
This year’s event will be held on Sept. 21 with the nationally-televised game kicking off at 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon.
“I think it shows, number one, that the CFL has confidence in Moncton. It has interest in Moncton,” says Moncton Mayor George LeBlanc.
The league may have enough interest in Moncton to bring a game there, but football fans are left wondering whether that is enough to make city the home of the first CFL team on the East Coast.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Jonathan MacInnis
