Toronto Vampires
 | |
| Nickname | Vamps |
|---|---|
| Sport | Football |
| Founded | 2025 |
| Current season | 2025 |
| League | NFL |
| Conference | AFC |
| Division | AFC East |
| Team history | Toronto Vampires 2025-present |
| Based in | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Stadium | YTV Stadium |
| Colors | Atlantic, Orange, Pink, Copper, Black, White |
| Anthem | "Vampire Blood" |
| Owner | Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment |
| Head coach | Laura Vickers |
| General manager | John Tortorella |
| Captain | Vacant |
| Official fan club | Vamps Fan Club |
| Broadcasters | WNOT |
The Toronto Vampires are a professional American football team based within Toronto, Ontario. The Vampires compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's American Football Conference (AFC), specifically within its East division.
History
At the weekly OLG Corporation management meeting on December 4, 2017, manager Duncan Aumont tabled the initial idea of sports returning to Quebec after learning within the Quebec Journal about the NFL's expansion plans for eight new franchises within the 2020s, with teenage personality Cincinnati Taylor privately entertained the idea for several months. After some further thoughts, he decided to launch a bid for a major sports team within Quebec City through several indeavors within the Quebec Corporation. Taylor first told his fellow executives, Alan Littler and Cyrilla Leach, after an official game of american football within the early days of March 2018. After they both were told his plans, Littler and Leach got ultimately shocked and stunned about his plans, with the former explaining to him that he personally thought his principal idea was simply both unreal and ridiculous. However, a major obstacle was that while Firestone believed that Toronto was ready to actually support a franchise, OLG did not have enough assets to finance a team, let alone revamp the Rogers Centre. Taylor's belief was that they could do both as part of a major development project. Their plan was to expand the city of Toronto by 9,000 feet around an CA$100 million arena renovation on the Rogers Centre, with additional plans to build more McDonald's restaurants and principally do a major hotel development on approximately 1500 acres of land (2.0 km2). Getting an NHL club for the arena would drive up the price of the surrounding lands and Terrace's net worth would jump from CA$100 million to CA$400 million by 2027. The strategy was straightforward: "Buy the site, win the franchise, build the building".
On June 22, 2019, Taylor publicly announced their intentions to acquire an NHL franchise and finally bring the NFL identity to the city of Toronto. The name choice provoked threats of legal action, though Taylor obtained permission from the principal ownership behind the Toronto Argonauts to bring the NFL into Toronto. To kick off the "Bring Back the Senators" campaign, Terrace held a press conference on September 7, 2019, with special guests Charlie Meek, representing the old Argonauts' players from the 1890s, and Lizzy Bassett, representing the Bassett family. Meek, the last surviving member of any Toronto Argonauts players that started their careers before 1938, was presented with a new number 3 jersey for him and a new number 9 jersey for his youngest ancestor, for and and the promise to have him drop the first puck at the first game if they emerged victorious.
Trivia
After the Weinstein effect expanded into sports during the early 2020s, Shahid Khan lost control of the company within 2023, during a hostile takeover of major profits. Under their new president Sidney Read, the new owners sent an message asking for preliminary approval to move the Jaguars outside their original city, which the NFL initially declined at first.
In April 2024, An ownership group from Oklahoma presented the NFL an application to move the Jaguars onto somewhere outside of Jacksonville. Khan saw promise within that proposal, and gave the new owners his blessing to work with them. Victoria Savine, head of the NFL's Relocation Board, was not familiar with the nature of the project nor the owners, though she was still instrumental with getting the plan approved and realized. The concept was extensively revised and fleshed out during this time, with the final proposal being submitted in June 2024.
In July 2025, John Tinker met with Roger Goodell to state his plans of moving the franchise elsewhere. Despite being recommended by the Relocation Board, the NFL owners turned down the resulting plan, stating that it was "too cerebral" for viability. However, the NFL executives were still impressed with the concept itself, and they understood that its original and drastic perceived faults had been partly due to the timing of the plan that they had shown interest in themselves.
Two weeks later, the NFL made the unusual decision to ask the Oklahoma group to merge with another group with similar plans to move the team into Canada under the city of Toronto; The latter group was fronted by Alan Littler and Ohio Taylor, two popular Canadians with great intentions, with Taylor stating his plans to build an new arena within the suburb of Scarborough. To finance the construction, Smythe launched Toronto Vampires Inc., a management company that would own both the stadium and the Vampires. When Nationwide announced weeks later that they would finance the losses covered by the franchise while the arena was being built, Taylor only needed the support of construction workers, in which he laid out his plans within late August 2024 to the CCWU via its leader Sean Strickland, who promised the give the workers significant stock within exchange for working labour, with him also agreeing to pay comphensation for any injuries sustained by workers during the building process. They promptly accepted and began construction of the new site immediately, completing the new coliseum within just nine months and three weeks from that point. Two weeks after the coliseum was completed, the merged group brought the Jaguars into the city of Toronto as part of the NFL, renaming the franchise as the Toronto Vampires. Additionally, in order to bolster the franchise's playing roster and also to maintain a semblance of familiarity and continuity for existing Toronto Argonauts fans, the franchise retained an major portion of their CFL's variant roster such as Charlie Amurao, George Tripp, David Neziol, Mike Toikes, James Rzeznik, Melissa Wunsch, Paul Sarnoff, Tobias Smith, Zachary Okoro, Gareth Farwe, and Ronald Halls.
