Edward Rogers

Edward Samuel Rogers III

• School University of Western Ontario
• High School Upper Canada College

• Born June 22, 1969 in Toronto, ON CAN

Biographical Information

Edward Rogers is the son of Edward Samuel Rogers, Jr., better known as Ted Rogers, who was the head of one the largest media corporations in Canada, Rogers Communications, and owner of the Toronto Blue Jays. He has two sisters, Melinda and Martha.

After beginning his career with Comcast in Philadelphia, PA, Edward worked for Rogers for 20 years, holding senior executive positions in a number of its entities, particularly Rogers Cable. After Ted's death in 2008, Edward became chairman and sole owner of the Blue Jays, through the Rogers Control Trust, the family trust, although he was not able to obtain the chairmanship of the parent company, as the other shareholders squeezed him out, relegating him to the vice-chairmanship. Nadir Mohamed, who had been Rogers' Chief Operating Officer in Ted's time and came from the more profitable wireless side of the business, was instead chosen as the new chairman. Mohamed retired from the company in 2013 and was replaced by an outsider, Guy Laurence, also from the wireless industry (he had been the chairman of the British firm Vodaphone), further marginalizing the founding family's grip on the business. Edward resigned his Vice-President position in early 2014.

As he became a hands-off shareholder of Rogers Communication, Edward Rogers concentrated more of his focus on the Blue Jays. Under his father's stewardship, the team was mainly a property needed to fill airtime on Rogers Sportsnet, and only marginal effort was put in ensuring there was a winning product on the field. Thus the team had fallen quite a bit from its heyday of the early 1990s, when three million fans a year would pack the Skydome (now Rogers Centre). After his father's death, Edward put more energy in ensuring the Blue Jays were competitive and allocated additional funds to do so. The hiring of young Alex Anthopoulos as General Manager in 2009, and the aggressive moves which ensued, showed this change of direction. As a result, the Jays won their first division title in two decades in 2015, while attendance and viewership numbers on Rogers Sportsnet went through the roof.

Further Reading

• Kelly Pullen: "The Man Who Would Be King: inside the ruthless battle for control of the $34-billion Rogers empire", Toronto Life, October 16, 2014. [1]