Major League Soccer Turns Ten

The Kansas City Star points out a coming birthday: Major League Soccer is about to turn 10. The league has certainly evolved: from the massive attendance at Foxboro for New England Revolution games in the early years, coupled with simultaneous fears of an early demise, to a more stable but possibly less ambitious league. Unlike earlier American soccer incarnations like the NASL, MLS does not seem to be aiming for MLB, the NFL, or the NBA. Instead, it is content to be smaller, different, but lasting.

The sports law issues MLS has brought us over the last decade are memorable. Organized as a single Limited Liability Company (LLC) with “investor-owners”, the MLS presented a credible case for application of the so-called “single-entity defense” to a Sherman Act §1 violation. In a nutshell, that defense argues that a single entity is incapable of “conspiring, combining, or contracting” with itself in a manner that offends the antitrust laws. In Fraser v. Major League Soccer, 284 F.3d 47 (1st Cir. 2002), the First Circuit cast doubt on MLS’s single-entity status. More recently, MLS has pioneered the commercialization of franchise names, as Mike discussed here.

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