Corporate & Securities Law

Drew Brees on Antitrust

By David Fischer

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees has used his bye-week to write an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post about the potential affects of the American Needle case on free agency in the NFL.  It is already available online.  He writes:

I could choose to sign a contract with the Saints because of a crucial player-led antitrust lawsuit in 1993 that secured players’ rights to sell our services as free agents. Until that case, team owners had acted together to control players and keep salaries low, while the popularity of the game and teams’ revenues grew exponentially. Today, if the Supreme Court agrees with the NFL’s argument that the teams act as a single entity rather than as 32 separate, vigorously competitive and extremely profitable entities, the absence of antitrust scrutiny would enable the owners to exert total control over this multibillion-dollar business.

What might the owners do? They could agree to end or severely restrict free agency, continue to enter into exclusive agreements that will further raise prices on merchandise, lock coaches into salary scales that don’t reward them when they’re promoted and set higher ticket prices (including preventing teams from competing through ticket discounts).

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Full post as published by Antitrust Review on January 08, 2010 (boomark / email).