On Sept. 27, 2026, the Buffalo Bills organization will open its brand-new, $2.2 billion Highmark Stadium when they host the Detroit Lions before a national audience on Amazon Prime Video. I’ll be in Orchard Park, New York—along with 60,107 of my closest friends—praying as we always do that this is the year the Bills finally bring home a Lombardi Trophy.
A Fight They Did Not Pick
In a break from tradition, the Bills have asked the Toronto-based band Barenaked Ladies to perform "O Canada," prior to the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
It’s already the smartest thing the Bills have done all year.
At a time of heightened tensions between Washington, D.C. and the Canada's capital, Ottawa, any American business with a cross-border customer base should learn from what the Bills are doing. Every communications shop should also study how they did it, because the mechanics are portable to almost any client that gets pulled into a fight they did not pick.
Over the past few months, the Bills have encountered significant dissatisfaction across their customer base as they moved towards opening the new building.
Highmark Stadium has the smallest seating capacity in the NFL. It is also, according to a study conducted by the Action Network, the most expensive place to attend a game—nearly $2,200 for a family of four. When the doors to the new stadium opened this summer, some of the first fans through the turnstiles encountered railings and structural elements blocking their sightlines. Others complained when the team announced new restrictions on tailgating. Just two weeks ago, with the regular season looming, the team tore out and replaced its natural grass turf given what one NFL field expert told The Athletic were “major deformations” after just two preseason games.
Caught in the Middle of Cross-Border Tensions
The Bills are also uniquely positioned as an NFL franchise in their reliance on a strong Canadian consumer base, with the city seated on Lake Erie, directly across from the border. Southern Ontario fans account for roughly 18% of the deposits placed on personal seat licenses for the new stadium. Last season, an estimated 8,000 Canadians held season tickets—thousands of fans who can make the difference between a capacity crowd and visible gaps on a national broadcast.
At the same time, crossing the border has become a careful decision for many. Canadians took roughly 7.1 million fewer trips to the United States in 2025, a 25% collapse, and spent about C$3.3 billion less, according to Statistics Canada. Early 2026 figures have shown some degree of stabilization, but not a recovery, and the latest round of government-to-government tensions, coming right before the football season, has made it harder still.
For a business with fewer units to sell, at higher prices than ever before, and a strong reliance on customers who have fewer incentives to spend their money, all of this added up to a live customer-service problem before the season even started. It’s not something the Bills could solve with a press release—the team needed to ensure that all of Southern Ontario felt like it was still part of Bills Mafia.
Practitioners should, of course, note how the problem got defined—it arrived looking like a political issue, but evolved into revenue risk. It’s that second framing that made it solvable.
Acknowledging the Canadian Audience
With 90 seconds during the pregame ceremonies, the Bills are sending a clear message about how they value their Canadian fans. The team’s owner, Terry Pegula, also owns the Buffalo Sabres, Buffalo’s National Hockey League franchise, which has featured "O Canada" prior to home games for decades. Extending the Canadian National Anthem to Highmark Stadium demonstrates that the front office values its Canadian fans at a time when it’s not necessarily easy for them to do so.
There has already been some blowback from fans who viewed this as a political statement. But for an NFL franchise today, the tradeoff between a week of angry calls into the local sports radio station, WGR 550, against thousands of customers who live north of the border is not a close call. This might just be the most efficient customer retention effort in professional sports history.
Of course, the execution matters just as much as the gesture. The Bills have largely let their decision stand on its own rather than pushing back against criticism in online comment sections or trying to take a victory lap beyond the simple announcement they put out. The moment a company tries to narrate their own goodwill, it stops looking like goodwill and starts reading as corporate positioning.
Other franchises have similar exposure right now. The Detroit Lions, who are visiting Buffalo Thursday, play their home games just across the river from Windsor. Seattle draws from Vancouver. Even Florida’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Miami Dolphins fill seats each winter with Canadians escaping the cold.
Communications Takeaways from the Bills Decision
So does every other business—take away football and there are four rules that communications professionals can take away from this:
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Measure your audience before quantifying the risk. The Bills knew what Southern Ontario brought to the table: 18% of their PSL deposits and about 8,000 season tickets. If you cannot say how large your aggrieved audience actually is, you’re only offering an opinion, not a strategic recommendation.
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Let precedent guide you. The Bills have not had to defend a new position. Terry Pegula owns the Sabres. The Sabres play "O Canada" before home games. The honest answer to anyone complaining about this decision is that the Pegula family is taking something they already do for hockey fans and extended it to football. Most organizations are already sitting on something similar—a decades-old policy, a long-running sponsorship or a market they've served since the beginning.
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Actions speak louder than words. The anthem will run 90 seconds. The game will last 3.5 hours. Without printing an open letter, designing a values page or posting a hashtag, the Bills spoke loud and clear to their customers.
The instinct in a polarized moment can be to say as little as possible and ride out the storm.
For a franchise that has spent six decades finding new and innovative ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the Bills found a way to win this one before kickoff.
Rich Luchette is a Senior Vice President at Precision Strategies. He lives in Washington, D.C.