Forget curling. (That was easy, wasn’t it?) No sport—no entertainment or soap opera, for that matter—riveted Canadians more in recent months than the corporate brawl among members of the Rogers family as they maneuvered for control of the country’s largest communications and media empire. That the sniping and backstabbing and butt-dialing—hold that thought—should have taken place in public, precisely as Rogers Communications attempted the multi-billion-dollar takeover of a rival, only added to the fun. Even though as a case history the episode will probably never be held up in any business-school Mergers, Acquisitions & LBOs course as a shining example of how it’s done.
Indeed, the real-life dispute has drawn comparisons to putatively over-the-top fictions such as Succession, The Young and the Restless, and Game of Thrones—that last an analogy supplied by Martha Rogers, who, as one of the key players in the Canadian drama, ought to know.
