Despite Winnipeg's national title (or perhaps even indirectly because of it) football in Western Canada was in crisis by the mid-1930s. The Great Depression, which had caused serious financial difficulties for professional sports across North America, hit Western Canada particularly hard. Making matters worse was the existence of massive disparity between teams within the provincial unions. For example, by 1935 the Regina Roughriders had won fourteen consecutive SRFU titles, mostly by lopsided margins. Moreover, by the 1930s the top Western teams had begun to tap the massive U.S. talent pool, signing American players who had been passed over by the National Football League and its rivals south of the border. While the presence of American players (later called "imports" and today officially known as "internationals") would play a decisive role in bringing the calibre of the top Western teams to a level approaching that of the top clubs in the East, it further exasperated the disparity within the Western provincial unions.