{"id":374,"date":"2026-07-13T13:41:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T13:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=374"},"modified":"2026-07-13T13:41:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T13:41:17","slug":"a-dissent-worthy-of-a-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=374","title":{"rendered":"A dissent worthy of a World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This month the World Cup final will be played at MetLife Stadium, home of the New York Giants and Jets. <\/p>\n

Read more How Justice Samuel Alito stands out<\/a><\/p>\n

Nobody finds it odd that soccer\u2019s biggest match will be staged in a stadium built for football. That\u2019s remarkable, because 44 years ago America\u2019s first major soccer league stood in front of the Supreme Court accusing the NFL of trying to strangle it. The North American Soccer League, the league of Pel\u00e9 and the New York Cosmos, challenged an NFL rule barring team owners from controlling franchises in other major professional sports leagues. It won below, and the NFL asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The court declined to do so.<\/p>\n

One justice thought that was a mistake. Justice William Rehnquist published a lone dissent from the denial of certiorari. The league he sided with is still stacking money. The league he sided against folded within two years.<\/p>\n

I. Football, American and otherwise<\/strong><\/p>\n

The heart of the case was a rule about football \u2026 American <\/em>football. At issue was an NFL rule prohibiting team owners from holding controlling interests in teams in any other professional sports league. NASL argued the rule existed to keep money and experienced sports owners away from rival leagues. So the soccer league sued under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, claiming the football league had conspired to cut it off from one of the few pools of investors who understood how to run a professional sports franchise.<\/p>\n

The district court never reached that question. Instead, it determined that the NFL could be treated as a single economic entity for purposes of Section 1 \u2013 one business rather than dozens of competitors. Because Section 1 requires an agreement between separate actors, and because a single entity cannot conspire with itself, the district court held that the NFL wasn\u2019t subject to the antitrust restriction.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reversed, holding that NFL teams could conspire with one another for purposes of Section 1 despite their participation in the same league. But rather than sending the case back to the district court, it went on to define the relevant market, and held that the cross-ownership rule unlawfully restrained competition in the market for \u201csports capital and skill.\u201d In sum, the circuit court concluded that the rule\u2019s anticompetitive effects in terms of closing off access to experienced sports executives outweighed its procompetitive justifications.<\/p>\n

The NFL petitioned for review by the Supreme Court. On December 6, 1982, the court denied it without comment \u2026 almost. Rehnquist, alone, wrote a dissent explaining why the court should\u2019ve taken up the case. This was not unusual for the man who, with 52 solo dissents, earned the nickname \u201cthe lone ranger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rehnquist loved sports, especially tennis. He played regularly, often with his clerks, well into his tenure as chief justice. He also loved to gamble, organizing small-stakes betting pools around the court on everything from presidential elections to snowfall totals. In NFL v. North American Soccer League<\/em>, he wagered that his lone dissent from denial would eventually pay off.<\/p>\n

II. The opinion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rehnquist\u2019s dissent from the court\u2019s decision not to take up the case opened with a procedural complaint. After arguing that the district court erred in treating the NFL as a single entity, Rehnquist concluded that the 2nd Circuit should simply have sent the case back to the lower court for further proceedings. But instead, the circuit court had decided the relevant market and evaluated the law\u2019s reasonableness, despite having no factual findings to review.<\/p>\n

Read more The limits of the Second Amendment<\/a><\/p>\n

Rehnquist\u2019s more fundamental disagreement, however, was with the merits. In his view, the 2nd Circuit had ignored the NFL rule\u2019s procompetitive effects and \u201cengaged in excessive speculation\u201d about its anticompetitive ones. Rehnquist saw the NFL as something like a joint venture. Teams compete fiercely on the field, but off of it they cooperate to compete together against other forms of entertainment. They pool broadcast revenue, negotiate television contracts together, and share information that would be valuable when competing against other sports leagues. Some cooperation, he argued, is essential to professional football\u2019s existence. What\u2019s more, the rule was narrow. An owner remained free to invest in television, movies, rock concerts, \u201cor anything else that suits his fancy,\u201d just not a rival league\u2019s team.<\/p>\n

The court of appeals, he wrote, \u201cseems to me to have implicitly adopted the view that businesses must arrange their affairs so as to make it possible for would-be competitors to compete successfully.\u201d But this inverted the whole point<\/em> of antitrust. Antitrust laws exist to protect competition, not to protect the competitors in the market. They do not require the NFL to run itself in a way that makes life \u201ceasier for another league to compete against it.\u201d And if the decision below were left to stand, he warned, that principle \u201cmay be reduced to a dead letter.\u201d<\/p>\n

III. The aftermath<\/strong><\/p>\n

The NASL won the lawsuit but lost the war. Within two years, it was dead. NASL played its last season in 1984 and folded the following spring. It was undone by expansion debts and television indifference, exacerbated by a post-Pel\u00e9 attendance collapse. The courts could force open the door to sports capital, but they could not force business people to fund professional soccer (or Americans to watch it).<\/p>\n

When professional soccer tried again in the 1990s, its founders had clearly done the reading. Major League Soccer adopted almost the opposite structure. Rather than independent clubs, it organized as a single limited liability company that owned every team itself, with investors buying interests in the league instead of individual franchises. In many respects, it reflected the conception of a sports league that the district court had embraced as immune from anti-trust liability.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s been blessed as a single entity by the courts. When disgruntled players brought a Section 1 challenge, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit ruled for the league, but declined to bless the single-entity theory, calling MLS a \u201chybrid\u201d arrangement and resolving the case on other grounds.<\/p>\n

A dissent wagers everything on its power to persuade someone someday in the future. To some extent, Rehnquist\u2019s paid off. His fear of a dead letter never materialized. Instead, the principle of \u201ccompetition, not competitors\u201d that he invoked remained one of the most enduring principles of modern antitrust law. Whatever damage\u00a0NASL v. NFL<\/em>\u00a0did in the 2nd Circuit, that principle recovered from it.<\/p>\n

When the Supreme Court finally confronted a similar issue in American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League<\/em> 28 years later, it rejected the idea that NFL teams are a single entity for Section 1 purposes. But it also emphasized that sports leagues require a substantial degree of cooperation to produce their product, and many league rules therefore likely remain perfectly lawful despite their \u201canti-competitive\u201d effect, echoing Rehnquist\u2019s dissent. And when \u201ca certain degree of cooperation\u201d is necessary for a product to survive, restraints on trade may require no more judicial review than a \u201ctwinkling of an eye.\u201d This nod toward protecting competition reflected much of what Rehnquist said about the original challenged NFL rule.<\/p>\n

The World Cup final will be played on July 19 in an NFL stadium before an audience the NASL\u2019s founders could scarcely have imagined. American soccer eventually got the crowds, the capital, and the legitimacy it wanted. The NASL didn\u2019t live to see it. But the principle Rehnquist defended \u2013 that antitrust law protects competition rather than competitors \u2013 did. <\/p>\n

Read more The man and the movement: a Q&A with Peter Canellos on his biography of Samuel Alito<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month the World Cup final will be played at MetLife Stadium, home of the New York Giants and Jets. Read more How Justice Samuel Alito stands out Nobody finds it odd that soccer\u2019s biggest match will be staged in a stadium built for football. 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