Probably shouldn't but here goes. You are barking up the wrong tree, if you are looking for anything profound in response to this on here. This isn't the Voyageurs board of 15 years ago, which was the go to place for the up-to-date news and interesting opinions about Canadian soccer, but a weird little chat group that trundles on out of force of habit more than anything else that is full of 1984 style doublethinkers that are ready to lash out at any thought criminals who deviate from the party line. The crowd at THF was announced at 6500, there were no acres of empty seats in the lower bowl in that screen grab you have just posted rant rave... My understanding from what has been posted elsewhere (mainly Twitter) is that the province of PEI is believed by some people to have kicked in $1.5 million to help make it happen as they saw some potential from a tourism marketing standpoint given the scope for getting it on overseas sports broadcasters that are crying out for live sports content right now. If Duane Rollins is to be believed (can't believe I just wrote that, but the rest of his info in this context was almost 100% dead on for once), the owners only voted 5-3 to proceed even after getting the 25% pay cut from the players and other staff. That was subsequently vehemently denied by Angus McNab and others, but what else were they going to say? Something to ponder is whether the ten year Mediapro deal that underpins CSB by at a minimum picking up the very expensive production costs for professional level broadcasting might have been voided leaving it wide open to possible renegotiation on less favourable terms if nothing happened this year? What's probably keeping the league alive and Mediapro interested is the hope for a better tomorrow after WC 2026. If you believe in that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and have deep enough pockets to be able to sustain the short-term loss, the tournament may have been necessary to keep the CSB single entity business model functioning. If not, there may have been penalty clauses inserted at the outset that make leaving the party more painful than beneficial financially at this point. We'll probably never know for sure the details on that and what really happened during the scarily long delay between announcing that agreement had been reached on the season format and actually launching the island tournament, but why not see it as a positive that the league lived to fight another day? They have done what they needed to do to go into a long term survival mode in terms of downsizing on player salaries to the bare minimum possible to be considered fully pro rather than following some of the space cadet stuff that used to get posted, podcasted and blogged about a few years back, so fingers crossed there will eventually be some long term gain out of this for Canadian soccer rather than another CSL style death spiral, if the dream of a pot of gold ever starts to fade amongst even the hardcore true believers. Over and out...