It was announced over the weekend that the Buffalo Bills will face the Pittsburgh Steelers in a preseason game in mid-August to kick start the Bills’ five-year bid to expand their market into Canada.

Bills fans are not happy about this, as reported by USAToday.com:

The game against the Steelers, unveiled Thursday as part of the Bills' preseason schedule, will be one of Buffalo's three preseason games played at Toronto's Rogers Centre — one every other year through 2012. Buffalo will also play five annual regular-season games, starting this year, at the downtown, retractible-roof facility as part of the team's deal reached in February with a Toronto sports partnership group.

"This somewhat finalizes how we want to regionalize this franchise and put a stick in the ground above the border," Brandon said. "We would be remiss if we did not try to capture over five million people within our home marketing territory ... and try to strengthen the franchise right here in western New York."

"This is a really exciting step for us," said Adrian Montgomery, spokesman for Rogers Communications, one of the main stakeholders in the Toronto series of games. "It's a new era in Toronto sports and Canadian sports. It's actually real now that the NFL's coming."

The Bills will also play a regular season game there during the regular season, but the opponent has not been announced yet.

The team’s chief operating officer Russ Brandon made it clear that this was not a step toward the team moving to the Rogers Center permanently.

This will be the fourth time the Bills will play in Canada. They faced the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers in the Toronto during the 1990s and they took on the CFL’s Tiger-Cats in Hamilton during the early 1960s.

For more news mentioning the Bills reported by the Biz of Football check here.

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