Recent story re: Vancouver franchise fee

[Johnnie Monster]

The recent article appearing in the Vancouver Sun / Financial Post has been published with an extremely misleading headline.

Just to be clear, there is NO issue whatsoever with Vancouver paying the $40 million.

However, former Yahoo! executive and Vancouver bid applicant Jeff Mallett stressed the group is confident that planned renovations will proceed at BC Place, making it MLS-ready by the time the Whitecaps begin play there in 2011.

He said his group still expects to pay a $40-million fee if it is selected to join the league. Toronto FC paid a $10 million franchise fee three years ago while Seattle and Philadelphia paid $30 million each to begin play in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

"We know the league is looking for $40 million and we respect that," Mallett said in an interview. "All our financial modelling has been done around the $40 million."

This is not Montreal Part Deux.

[piltdownman]

What a crap piece of Yellow journalism. Sure if the stadium upgrades, which are already excepting bids, don't happen, then Vancouver will have to retract their bid. So somehow the headline is about something completely different, something that in fact not in alignment with the story or the truth.

[PG Tips]

I saw that crap article today too and the first thing I thought of was, it's got to be a Vancouver Sun/Province article. Typical Canwest Global journalism that has to resort to sensationlism and misleading writing. Their absurd television news is the same unfortunately.