The Expos of the post-Bronfman era were plagued by ownership that varied from incompetent to borderline criminal but nobody would have cared if it didn't impact the team negatively on the field. Horrible owners sometimes win championships and when they do the fans give them a pass. So winning is the defining factor in whether or not someone decides to spend their money on a product or not.
However, in the case of the Expos, their budgetary, administrative and ownership issues pretty much ensured that winning was impossible. Bronfman was a bit of a cheapskate which is why he decided to sell in the first place. He gladly participated in the owner collusion scandal during the 80's and once the gig was up he cashed in his chips rather than pay what the going rate for players was going to be. Anyone looking to buy the team from him should have been able to see what Bronfman saw: that costs were going up exponentially. But for whatever reason these facts were either lost on Brochu and his partners or ignored. But you had to know it would end badly since all together they probably didn't even have as much money as Bronfman. So how were they going to field a competitive team with even less money at their disposal than the guy they bought it from? Brochu may have acted like Scrooge but most of the money that was being spent wasn't his. He was merely the front man for a group of small fry minority owners who either couldn't or wouldn't spend what was required to be competitive. Then of course came Loria and Mini-Me who purposely ran the franchise off a cliff, took their payoff and left the entire mess in Bud Selig's hands.
Given all that, it's a miracle that even 5000 people bothered to buy tickets to Expos games. But no matter the reasons behind it, the not winning and the absence of any hope of winning sealed their fate in the eyes of the fans.
The Als used to fill the Big O in the late 70's but by the early 80's went belly up and came back briefly as the Concordes. Within 5 years they went from crowds of over 50K to less than 5K. Again the common thread was that they stopped being an elite team. Even today's version of the Als, even when they were perennial Grey Cup favourites, their appeal was largely confined to the 20K who showed up to games. If they won the Cup then people would show up en masse for the victory parade just like they show up en masse for the St. Patrick's Day Parade. But like a lot of non-hockey sports in Quebec, support for football is a mile wide and about an inch deep. It doesn't take much to go from sell-out crowds to a half-empty stadium. All it takes is a few too many games in the loss column.
I believe (and hope) that a major league baseball team can return to Montreal and thrive there. But it will have to be run like a Swiss watch and whoever owns it will have to be willing to spend money when the situation calls for it. If the team is in the playoff hunt at the deadline the owner(s) must be willing to help get them over the hump even if it means spending a pile of money to do it. I keep thinking of that one season during the time that the club was owned by MLB and they refused to allow the team to add anyone which could have helped them make the playoffs. Making the post-season that year could have saved the franchise but MLB wasn't interested in spending a dime more than it had to. Whatever faint hope the remaining fans had was extinguished forever at that point. Aside from the Mark Langston deal, I can't think of a single instance during the history of the Expos where they went "all in" trying to win the pennant.
I respect your contention however, it doesn't apply across the board. Winning has its importance but the longevity of a team, how it operates within the context of a 30-team league is far more important as it's not reasonable to expect a team to win consistently or to win the big prize with the odds being so low. It's far to easy to drum up the Habs winning in decades past operating in a 6-team league and during several years where the rules favored their acquisition of the best players, not to mention decades where they were favored by having the best and most shrewd management types. This doesn't create any precedent for fans expecting to win and only attending if they win. It's in the past, the team and league don't operate that way anymore, it can't be used as fans expecting to win only. It's just a confluence of events and circumstances that favored Montreal fans in the past century -- they no longer apply.
I can't agree with your contention about "horrible owners" and how they spend their money. If you're a horrible owner, you're usually ripping off the fans by sapping into the product, you're cashing in on revenues and that will usually translate into a lesser product on the field. Fans are not dumb, they'll catch on readily and will abandon ship when the owners themselves don't have confidence in the product they're putting out.
Again, I'm not going to give any credence to arguments based on the Als for reasons I've already expounded upon. The Als are not representative of how fans will conduct themselves with the more established major league sports that define a city's image across North America. Hence, whatever trendlines you choose to extrapolate from the CFL need to be put in their proper context. The CFL has no star power, no identification process of the magnitude that a star player of a major league team will have. A 9 team league that can't even field teams to fill a full balanced slate, and worse who jerrymandered the configuration of its "regions" to include a team in the wrong geographically based divisions, is nothing more than a small time chump diversion. The CFL in the 70s and 80s was commonly mocked as standing for Cheap Foreign Labor. A league of rejects. It shouldn't be a precedent in a conversation about the Habs and what their fans are after or what in general, fans are like in Quebec.
As for the Expos and their prospects, we're no longer in 2004, there is far greater revenue sharing now. Heck, you have a team like the Milwaukee Brewers is a backwater when compared to Montreal and that is thriving. The gloom and doom scenarios that you are envisaging were more appropriate at a time when the team was run by penny pinchers and where the league was more favorable to owners who spent their own money. Claude Brochu and the consortium pocketed a lot of the revenue sharing money from their day, they didn't reinvest it in the players. Jean Coutu was part of the consortium at the time and his vision for the team was to run it like his pharmacies -- it was a bottomline operation, where it had to produce an immediate profit and he would always be advocating new ways of generating revenue that involved cutting into the product, being overly frugal on player retention and ultimately killing the product. Would you expect fans to be on board with this type of vision and management?
Before you say Bronfman was a bit of cheapskate, just remember what happened when Jean Drapeau had to put together a group of financiers to put the $1 Million franchise fee in 1968. Ten of the city's richest individuals were solicited by Drapeau to pony up their share to make good on the money. So Drapeau calls a meeting for all 10 to decide who pays in what proportion. The day of the meeting came and only Charles Bronfman showed up. And he put up the totality of the franchise fee on his own. So there's no way I'm going to remotely crap on Bronfman, if it wasn't for him, there would have been no major league baseball in Montreal, despite the facts that he had reticences near the end of his ownership of the team and did not embark upon the inflationary trends of the day that required more money than he wanted to pay to keep star players on the team long-term.
Baseball has been the most capitalist of major sports. It was a toy for the uber rich. Unfortunately for Montreal in the time that Bronfman was trying to sell the team, Montreal lost a hoarde of the very rich to Toronto. Bronfman to his credit, did not move to Toronto, but continued to invest locally. He was also concerned with ensuring that the team would continue in the city and only passed it on to Brochu and his consortium because he thought Brochu would keep the team in the community. Bronfman could have secured a far higher return if he was out to sell to the highest bidder, someone who would, like Loria, have bought into the team solely as a means of acceding to the select group of owners that have an MLB franchise -- a very exclusive club, but a very ultra rich club, one who mostly used their MLB teams as a promotional device, for tax breaks or merely as a toy fetish (and not to mention how no MLB team in the last 40 years was sold for less than its cost of acquisition). Clearly, Claude Brochu's consortium was out of his element.
And I am fully aware that Brochu was small potatoes individually, as head of the consortium and the consortium itself was of the small-minded variety. He was handpicked by Bronfman on account of Brochu being a Seagram's guy over many years. The city just didn't have the type of capitalist to be able to play with the rest of the owners in MLB. This has zero to do with winning or not winning. You can't run a franchise and expect fan support when it's wobbling from the time the consortium took over and who predictably ran it to the ground and put it on life support. You can't judge fans for not attending the mausoleum-worthy product they created. Fans have attended Expos games during many seasons where they didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of contending -- and that tells you that winning is not the be-all and end-all -- it's nice to contend, it fun to have hope and dreams and when a team is well managed, where revenues from baseball are reinvested on the field, where a fan can identify with a player and be able to count on that player being around for most of his career, when a player is being brought up, is a bred organizational player -- there is an anticipation and association with the player that becomes in itself, an act of winning.
If you still have season tickets of the Expos that you claim you want to sell, let's not confuse the value of memorabilia with a real thing that mattered for all the right reasons and that was allowed to die by those who had no business owning it in the first place. The fact of fans not choosing to attend was a backlash against what the owners at the relevant times, stood for and chose to act upon. It shows you that fans are smart and they were right in not supporting the team -- it was doomed to fail on account of shortsighted ownership that was ill equipped and incompetently managed the team. It in now way should be used as an example about how fans will only support a team if it is winning -- nothing could be more further from the truth.