VANCOUVER — An appealing aspect of the Canadian Football League has long been the idea that many of its players are paid like ordinary working stiffs, and make a lot less than some.

This week — as the sports news is full of the gut-punch National Football League fans in St. Louis have taken, now that multi-billionaire Rams owner Stan Kroenke has jettisoned that city in favour of Los Angeles — there is another reason to be grateful for football loyalty on a humbler scale.

That reason: nobody ever owned a CFL team hoping to get rich. Or richer.

The league’s two wealthiest franchises, Saskatchewan and Edmonton, are community-owned. Of the others, the goal is to break even, maybe make a buck or two, or at least not lose a bundle.

A few owners might even be called philanthropists. Bob Young in Hamilton and David Braley in Vancouver and Toronto have done nothing less than rescue desperate franchises from ruin. Bob Wetenhall in Montreal and Jeff Hunt in Ottawa brought football back from the dead in those cities.

Say what you want about Braley recouping some of his losses with Grey Cups before he leaves the stage; I’d like to have someone show me how he comes out with a net profit after the years he spent propping up money losers.

The Calgary Flames didn’t buy the Stampeders nor Larry Tanenbaum and MLSE invest in the Argos entirely out of the goodness of their hearts, but is there any doubt they stabilized franchises that were in iffy financial shape?

Contrast that with what just happened in the mad scramble by three National Football League teams — St. Louis, Oakland and San Diego — to be first to get to Los Angeles, and all the back-stabbing that went on behind the scenes before Tuesday night’s owners vote to side with the guy who has the most money (shocking).

There is no more helpless feeling, for a fan base, than being held hostage by an owner who uses the fans’ emotions against them, which is why St. Louis may be the saddest of all abandonment stories. The city and state had agreed to pony up $400 million toward the cost of a new stadium for Kroenke, even though the existing stadium, the Edward Jones Dome, which was also built for Kroenke’s Rams with public money, was only 20 years old.

Oakland and San Diego weren’t going to fund new playpens for the Raiders and Chargers with no questions asked, yet the NFL chose to uproot from the only city of the three that was yielding to the owner’s threats.

In the end, the league couldn’t resist Kroenke’s $2 billion-plus plan to build a stadium complex in Inglewood on the site of the old Hollywood Park racetrack that was once the property of former Argos owner Harry Ornest.

Sure, CFL fans in most markets have been through the wringer with “Save Our (team name here)” campaigns, but the threats were never “or else we’re moving to The Big City” — they were, “or else we’ll have to cease operations.”

At least a few of those places have also seen the hammer wielded, far less kindly, by National Hockey League owners angling for a better deal, with little subtlety about what they’d do if they didn’t get it (or in Winnipeg’s case, what they did do in 1996, relocating the old Jets to Phoenix).

Edmonton in the 1990s had prospective buyers of the Oilers wheeled into town to try to bully the city, and Calgary currently is getting the full Gary Bettman shaming treatment for failing to get on board with a billion-dollar arena/stadium proposal. Hamilton was used repeatedly as a pawn in NHL teams’ relocation threats.

Maybe CFL owners would be that venal if they ever had a plausible alternative destination to wave in their cities’ faces, but it’s doubtful.

They got in the game with their eyes wide open. All the Canadian cities that have stadiums already have teams and the idea of building one in a place like Atlantic Canada where fans may be clamouring for a franchise has kept coming up against economic reality for more than 30 years now.

Those who think it was fair ball for Kroenke to move the Rams the moment his lease ran out in St. Louis say that at least he’s using his own money in L.A., forgetting that whatever it costs him to move and build is but the tiniest fraction of what he made in profits from the hearts of the St. Louis faithful for two decades of pretty paltry returns on their love.

It’s a good lesson, if a hard-earned one, for fans of teams in leagues where inflating franchise value is the end game and all other considerations are trivial.

The CFL, poor cousin though it may be, asks nothing more than to make a modest living, right where it is.

ccole@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/rcamcole