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'Time for the next step' MLS players to unionize after Supreme Court defeatPosted: Monday October 07, 2002 11:41 AMUpdated: Thursday October 10, 2002 1:56 PM
BOSTON (AP) -- With their legal battle snuffed out by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, Major League Soccer players will attempt to unionize in an effort to improve their bargaining power against the owners. "It's time for the players to move on to the next step: to come together and form a union," said Jeffrey Kessler, an attorney for the soccer players. "We expect that, eventually, the players will get their fair shake." Seven MLS players filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Boston in 1997, arguing that the league's single entity ownership structure was a sham designed to suppress player salaries. They also claimed that MLS conspired with the U.S. Soccer Federation to eliminate competition for the sport's top athletes. But a judge threw out the former claim and a jury rejected the latter, saying that even without another Division I circuit in this country, the league faced competition from premier leagues in Europe and Latin America, and from minor and indoor leagues in the United States. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to intervene. The nation's highest court agrees to hear only a small percentage of the appeals filed there and last heard a sports case last year when it granted golfer Casey Martin the right to ride a cart on the PGA tour. "The players were aware that this is a longshot," Kessler said. "But they have not been sitting idly by. There is another plan in place, and they will try to achieve through collective bargaining what they couldn't through litigation." Kessler said the players decided to sue in court rather than bargain for improvements to avoid the lockouts and strikes that tend to follow collective bargaining in professional sports. But they also thought it was their best shot at dismantling the single entity structure that keeps MLS teams from competing against each other for players. In MLS, all teams are centrally owned by the league and run by investors. By organizing in that way, teams can work together to a greater extent than separately owned teams without running afoul of antitrust laws that prohibit competitors from cooperating. The structure has been copied by virtually every new league, including the WNBA and now-defunct XFL, giving the lawsuit the potential to affect labor relations throughout sports. But U.S. District Judge George O'Toole rejected the claim, throwing out the crux of the players' suit. "Game competition, without a doubt, is part of the league's entertainment product, not an indicator of divergent economic interests among operators," O'Toole wrote. "MLS is what it is. As a single entity, it cannot conspire or combine with its investors ... and its investors do not combine or conspire with each other in pursuing the economic interests of the entity." That left the players with a claim that the league and U.S. Soccer Federation conspired to create a monopoly by blocking other leagues and depressing salaries. MLS won a jury verdict in 2000 after testifying that -- even without competition -- it lost $250 million in its first five seasons. Jurors said it was unlikely that competition from a second premier league would have accomplished anything except driving both out of business. Both verdicts were upheld by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The lawsuit filed by players Iain Fraser, Steve Trittschuh, Sean Bowers, Mark Semioli, Rhett Harty, David Vaudreuil, Mark Dodd and Mark Dougherty was known as Fraser v. Major League Soccer, 02-140.
"Major League Soccer is pleased
that these seven years of litigation are now behind us," said MLS commissioner Don Garber. "We
are excited to concentrate on the tasks at hand, the foremost of which is
working with our players and focusing on the continued development of
professional soccer in the United States."
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