When Ed Rogers Buys the Leafs, He’ll Reshape Toronto
This year, Ed Rogers will buy out Bell’s stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment—and, by extension, the Toronto Maple Leafs—for $4.7 billion. It’s a massive shakeup in the world of Canadian sports and, in the year to come, he’ll be working furiously behind the scenes to make his investment pay off. He won’t do it through playoffs or sportscasts, but by leveraging the new golden goose of sports business: real estate. The consequences could reshape Toronto entirely.
Ever since Ed’s father, Ted Rogers, bought the Toronto Blue Jays in 2000, the name has been synonymous with sports in the city. The team may not have won a championship since he took over, but there’s a statue of Ted outside the Rogers Centre, and that’s what counts. Rogers also made headlines in 2013 when it acquired the national broadcasting rights to the NHL, taking over Hockey Night in Canada from the CBC and achieving a near-total ownership of hockey broadcasts. For the family, sports ownership is about legacy.
Now Ed Rogers wants to supersize it. These days, the business of sports is about leveraging associated assets. Sports teams—and their owners—make money by building stadiums and towers and leasing out commercial spaces. Ottawa’s Lansdowne area is a great example. Long desolate, it was rejuvenated when the city of Ottawa and a private consortium redeveloped Lansdowne Park, home to the Redblacks, and its surrounding areas for condos and retail spaces. It’s now a city within the city, where residents can go to the gym, get their pets groomed, buy groceries, see a game and then go to a bar—constantly spending money in the area. Similarly, in Edmonton, pharmacy billionaire and Oilers owner Daryl Katz has spent $2.5 billion on a mixed-use entertainment district surrounding Rogers Place, revitalizing the city’s downtown.
With the Toronto Maple Leafs, one of the most prized assets in all of North American professional sports, Ed Rogers now has the vehicle to unlock that kind of value. Since at least 2019, Rogers has been in talks with Brookfield Asset Management’s infrastructure arm to possibly replace the Rogers Centre with a new, smaller stadium and transform the surrounding land into a mixed-use district. If the company is smart, it will want to build condos, retail, movie theatres and everything else people want. Ed has the vision. Now we’ll see how he executes it.
In the next year, the back-end work will begin on the MLSE purchase. Rogers will consolidate its assets. As many financial analysts have pointed out, Rogers doesn’t have the $4.7 billion to buy out Bell’s MLSE assets. It will need to raise capital, and it can do that by spinning off Rogers Sports and Media as a separate IPO and putting all the teams there.
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Without the sports and media arm, Rogers will focus on its core telecoms business. Meanwhile, the entertainment company can do its own thing. With private equity pouring in, it will have the spending power to apply huge amounts of pressure on municipal and provincial governments. The city of Toronto, for instance, leases BMO Field to MLSE for Toronto FC and the Toronto Argonauts. Owning two of the stadium’s three tenants, Rogers will have an enormous amount of leverage over the city and the province about how to use the land around Exhibition Place: the perfect location for yet another new sports–real estate complex.
The governments will be open to Ed Rogers’s ideas. As the public sector continues to fumble the bag on big projects—unbuilt highways, unfinished LRTs—the public’s trust is shifting toward the private sector to get things done. This means governments have an increasing appetite to let private actors develop land on their behalf. Doug Ford can stand up and say, “We only need to contribute $100 million to get a huge stadium! Another win for the taxpayer!”
This could mean even more sports for Toronto as well. For example, Ed Rogers knows the NFL is big business. In 2014, he joined forces with Jon Bon Jovi and MLSE chairman Larry Tanenbaum to bring the Buffalo Bills to Toronto—though they lost to at least two other bidders. There’s every chance he’ll try again. He’ll also be working with government more closely next year, as MLSE collaborates with the city of Toronto to prepare for the 2026 World Cup.
In the meantime, he’ll have to play it carefully. Rogers only just finalized its purchase of Shaw in 2023, and that took two acrimonious years in the federal government’s competition tribunal. Already suspicious of Rogers’s monopoly power, Ottawa could prevent the MLSE sale. It’s a good thing Ed Rogers knows how to play 4D chess. Spending $4.7 billion on MLSE was a gamble—but he knows he’s going to win.
Michael Naraine is the associate professor of sport management at Brock University.
