Michael Webber ’93 credits the business law courses he took at Western Law for paving his way to Bay Street success as one of Canada’s biggest dealmakers when it comes to professional sports franchises.
In the past few years, Webber, vicepresident, legal, at Rogers Communications Inc., has played a central role in two key deals worth a combined $6.5 billion that not only shuffled the ownership deck chairs of two of Canada’s leading sports franchises, but will also reinvent the way Canadians consume hockey over digital devices.
“It’s pretty exciting,” said Webber, who oversees the content acquisition activity for Rogers, a company he joined in 2001 shortly after it acquired the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team.
His chief responsibility is managing the legal affairs of Rogers Media, which includes the company’s television and radio broadcasting, sports entertainment, publishing and digital media properties.
It’s been a hectic two years for Webber. In 2012, Rogers tag-teamed with arch rival BCE Inc. to buy a 75 per cent stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE), which owns the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team and the Toronto Raptors basketball franchise for $1.3 billion. It was a complex deal that saw existing owner Larry Tanenbaum increase his ownership stake in the team to 25 per cent while BCE and Rogers each took a 37.5 per cent stake. The deal allowed the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to exit its investment in Maple Leaf Sports.
Shortly after, Rogers, which owns the television channel Sportsnet, as well as various sports radio channels, purchased Score Media Inc. for $167 million. It operates the country’s third-largest sports channel, broadcasting mostly headline news and ticker scores and has since been rebranded Sportsnet 360.
But it was the mammoth 12-year, $5.2-billion licensing deal with the National Hockey League announced last November that really shook up the sports world and set a new precedent, bumping CBC from its long-held post as lead broadcaster of Canada’s national pastime.
“It’s a game-changing deal for Rogers,” said Webber. “It came up relatively quickly from a legal perspective.”
Not only is it the largest media rights deal in NHL history, but it is all-inclusive, meaning that Rogers bought the rights to broadcast national games across all technology platforms, such as smartphones or tablets, in any language.
It’s expected to set a precedent in the way other rights deals will take shape in other sports. Usually a sports team signs a separate deal covering various rights, such as radio or television. What was particularly challenging was the time frame – Rogers had a mere five days to strike a deal.
“That seems to be happening more and more. You don’t have the luxury of months for getting things done any more. Everything has to be done yesterday,” said Webber, a self-confessed “diehard Leafs fan.”
However, because it was an all-inclusive deal and they weren’t trying to carve out different rights, “it was probably easier than other deals to structure,” Webber said. “There were not a lot of sticking points. It was a partnership from the get-go.”
Webber has always been interested in business and making deals. In fact, it was the business-leaning curriculum and the joint overlap of courses with the Richard Ivey School of Business that attracted him to Western Law in the first place.
Webber made it a priority to take as many business courses as possible, including secured financing, commercial law and corporate finance, a course taught by Richard McLaren, a professor who made a big impact on him. When he thinks back to his Western Law days, Webber remembers the camaraderie the most. “From a social perspective, it was great, and from an academic perspective, I was learning what I wanted and needed to learn,” he said.
He played for the law school’s hockey team, despite his “inability to skate.”
Upon graduation in 1993, Webber joined the law firm Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, where he summered and articled before joining as an associate. There, he was exposed to a range of deals, as well as financing, joint venture and commercial law issues that gave him the grounding he needed to move into a corporate counsel setting.
An opportunity arose to join Rogers and support its growing media division and he jumped at it. He was the first lawyer assigned to the group, which was quickly adding to its broadcasting and publishing assets and breaking into the sports world with the Blue Jays acquisition. Today, nine lawyers now support the group.
“I never thought I would end up in a place where I could be involved in NHL acquisitions or managing legal issues for the Toronto Blue Jays,” said Webber.
He’s now ready for the next challenge. Webber said the Rogers crew is “going full steam ahead to get ready for what’s going to be a neat launch to the NHL season.
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