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Canadian Football League commissioner Randy Ambrosie’s globe-trotting, deal-making initiative excluded the people he says he wants to partner with most: CFL players.

There wasn’t an active player in Mexico City for the groundbreaking combine and draft in January, as Ambrosie’s CFL 2.0 project kicked off in earnest. Nor was there a representative from the CFL Players Association on site.

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Nobody from the CFLPA accompanied Ambrosie in February on a whirlwind tour through London, Vienna and Helsinki that produced working agreements with football entities in France, Austria, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

It seems an opportunity was missed.

Ambrosie came home and soon set out on the second edition of Randy’s Road Trip, during which he will visit all nine current CFL cities and wind up in Atlantic Canada, where the league hopes a 10th franchise will take root.

Pressing the flesh and making media appearances is a good thing for CFL exposure. But there is no room for the CFLPA built into that initiative either, despite the fact that collective bargaining agreement sessions between the league and the players are sandwiched between the first seven stops on the tour and the final three.