Players v. League: Battling the Sports Monopolies

The NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, and the NHL each dominate their sport. For most of the twentieth century that dominance gave owners almost total control over the people who played the games. Players could not choose where they worked or bargain on an open market, and were often bound to one team for their entire careers. How did players win the freedom to change teams, and what role did antitrust law play?

In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with James W. Quinn, the longtime Weil, Gotshal & Manges trial lawyer who served as outside counsel to the major sports players associations and litigated many of the cases that brought free agency to professional sports. Quinn, now a mediator and arbitrator, traces the history from the first antitrust challenges through the fall of the reserve system, the battles that brought free agency to football and hockey, and the revenue-sharing fights that define sports labor today.

How One League Came to Rule Each Sport

Rival leagues have appeared in every sport: the AFL in football, the ABA in basketball, and the WHA in hockey. Each time, Quinn explains, the challenger either folded or merged into the established league, and the reason was usually the players. Two leagues meant two bidders. When the ABA competed with the NBA, the average NBA salary doubled in two years, and Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, came out of college into a bidding war. Mergers, and a single draft, ended that competition.

The Baseball Exemption and Radovich

The Supreme Court first addressed sports and antitrust law in Federal Baseball, holding that baseball was not interstate commerce and so fell outside the Sherman Act. Quinn calls the reasoning indefensible. When Curt Flood challenged baseball's reserve clause, the Court acknowledged the exemption was an anomaly but left any change to Congress, which later removed the exemption for major league players' labor issues in the Curt Flood Act. Other sports were treated differently. In Radovich v. NFL, a player blacklisted for joining a rival league after returning from Navy service in World War II won a ruling that football is subject to the antitrust laws. Basketball and hockey followed.

Television and the Sports Broadcasting Act

Antitrust suits in the 1950s, including one brought by the United States, challenged the NFL's effort to pool its teams' television rights and sell them as a package. Quinn explains that pooling plainly restrains competition among teams. Congress responded with the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which exempted league-wide television contracts. A later amendment approved the AFL–NFL merger, and Quinn recounts the raised eyebrows when New Orleans, in the home state of the bill's key congressional supporters, soon received an expansion team.

Players Organize: The 21-Minute Strike

Players' associations took hold in the 1960s, led by Larry Fleisher in basketball and Marvin Miller in baseball. The turning point in basketball came at the 1964 NBA All-Star Game in Boston, the league's first prime-time national broadcast. Oscar Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, and the other stars refused to take the court until the owners agreed to a pension plan. Despite threats that some of them would never play again, they held out until the owners gave in about 21 minutes later. The owners could not afford to punish the league's best players. Quinn notes that superstars leading fights that benefit less secure teammates became a recurring pattern.

Robertson v. NBA and the Reserve System

Weil, with antitrust lawyer Ira Millstein leading the players' effort, won a preliminary injunction against the proposed ABA–NBA merger. Quinn, then a young associate, joined the case that followed, Robertson v. NBA, which also attacked the reserve system. Under that system, a team could renew an expiring contract for a year at the same salary, then renew it again, indefinitely. A rookie who became a superstar could be kept at rookie pay for his whole career. The real-world bidding between the ABA and NBA gave the players a natural experiment showing what open competition was worth.

Free Agency Arrives

Baseball players, barred from antitrust court by the exemption, used arbitration instead. Arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the standard contract's option clause gave teams one additional year, not a perpetual renewal. Because nearly every contract had the same clause, the owners faced a flood of free agents and negotiated a new system. The Robertson settlement brought free agency to basketball at about the same time. Quinn stresses that free agency was about control as much as money: players could finally move to a team where they would actually play, rather than being stashed on the bench of a rich club.

The Small-Market Surprise

Owners predicted that free agency would let rich teams buy up the talent and ruin competitive balance. Quinn explains that the evidence, later presented at trial in football's McNeil case, showed the reverse. Struggling and small-market teams, especially those with sharp general managers, finally had access to talent and improved faster. Fewer teams stayed permanently at the bottom, and fans who had feared losing their stars found they could gain them too.

By the late 1970s, basketball and baseball players had won free agency. Football and hockey players had not. Winning it took decertifying a union, a four-month antitrust trial, and years of lockouts. Once free agency was settled, the fight shifted to a new question: how to divide the leagues' ever-growing revenue.

Football's Lost Decade

NFL players won an antitrust case of their own in Mackey v. NFL, but then bargained away much of what they had won in exchange for other benefits. Quinn says those benefits turned out to be worth far less. Salaries stayed low for another decade, and one owner described players as "cattle." Change came with Gene Upshaw, the Hall of Fame Raiders guard who became head of the NFL Players Association and refocused the union on free agency. In football, free agency means more than money. A backup buried on one team's depth chart could be a starter somewhere else.

Decertification and the Labor Exemption

When the NFLPA hired Quinn, courts had held that under the "non-statutory labor exemption," players represented by a union could not bring antitrust claims against the league's labor rules, even after their collective bargaining agreement expired. The players' answer was to stop being a union. The NFLPA decertified, became a trade association that did no collective bargaining, and funded individual players' antitrust suits with its group licensing revenue.

McNeil v. NFL

The lead plaintiff was Freeman McNeil, the Jets' star running back, joined by seven other players. The target was "Plan B," which let each team reserve its 37 best players and offer only the rest to other teams, a system Quinn calls a charade. Mock juries showed women supporting the players by more than 90 percent, so the players' team used its peremptory strikes to remove men, and the jury seated after the four-month trial in Minnesota was entirely female. Sex-based peremptory strikes were not yet prohibited at the time. The Supreme Court's 1994 decision in J.E.B. v. Alabama later held them unconstitutional. The jury found that Plan B violated the antitrust laws and awarded damages.

Hockey and the Lockout

Hockey salaries rose while the World Hockey Association competed with the NHL, then stalled after four WHA teams joined the NHL. Players' association head Alan Eagleson, later convicted of fraud, was too friendly with the owners to push for free agency. His successor, Bob Goodenow, organized the players, and Commissioner Gary Bettman, formerly of the NBA, answered with the first major lockout in sports. Quinn explains why lockouts work: players' careers are short, so a long strike costs them a far bigger share of lifetime earnings than it costs the owners. That first NHL lockout backfired when big-market owners pushed for a deal, and hockey got its first free agency, limited to veterans. Because hockey uses salary arbitration, the free agent market became the benchmark that raised salaries for everyone.

From Free Agency to Revenue Share

Quinn says free agency is now settled in every sport. The fight is over the share of revenue that goes to players, which sets the salary cap in football, basketball, and hockey and drove the recent lockouts. Baseball has no cap. It uses a luxury tax on high payrolls, with proceeds meant to help smaller-market teams compete with clubs like the Yankees and their YES Network. Quinn also explains why unions are exempt from antitrust law: the labor laws Congress enacted in the 1930s encourage workers to organize and bargain collectively. The result is a closed shop. Every NBA player, LeBron James included, is bound by the collective bargaining agreement.

What Comes Next

Quinn expects revenue-sharing battles to continue, alongside growing attention to player health, especially concussions in football and hockey. Leagues are also working to keep fans coming to stadiums and to exploit new channels such as league networks, streaming on multiple devices, and fantasy sports. He expects international growth to continue, in basketball especially, where China is the NBA's second-largest market. He is more skeptical about the NFL's international ambitions, given soccer's dominance abroad.

What to Know Now

The structures Quinn described remain largely in place. Baseball's antitrust exemption survives outside the major league labor context. Courts have continued to apply it to other claims, and the Supreme Court has declined recent invitations to revisit it. Minor league players, who had been left out of the Curt Flood Act, organized with the MLB Players Association and reached their first collective bargaining agreement. The Sports Broadcasting Act's limits have also been tested again. In the NFL "Sunday Ticket" antitrust case, a jury returned a multibillion-dollar verdict for subscribers who argued the package fell outside the Act's protection for free over-the-air broadcasts. The trial judge set the verdict aside, and the plaintiffs' appeal was argued in the Ninth Circuit in 2026. Supporters of the league model say pooled rights and a single league are what make these sports so valuable. Critics say they still suppress competition.

The newest "players v. league" fight is in college sports, and it echoes the history Quinn tells. In NCAA v. Alston (2021), a unanimous Supreme Court held that NCAA limits on education-related benefits violated the antitrust laws. Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence questioned the NCAA's broader compensation limits. Name, image, and likeness payments followed. In 2025, a federal court approved the House v. NCAA settlement, which provides billions in back damages and allows schools to share revenue directly with athletes. As in the professional leagues, antitrust litigation has opened a market for athletes' services, and questions about collective bargaining, athletes' employment status, and congressional action are now at the center of the debate. In September 2026 the Senate voted to take up the Protect College Sports Act, which would cap revenue sharing, allow pooled media rights, and give the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption.

The tactics Quinn pioneered were used again. In 2011, the NFL and NBA players' associations both decertified or disclaimed representation during lockouts and filed antitrust suits. In Brady v. NFL, however, the Eighth Circuit held that the Norris-LaGuardia Act barred an injunction ending the NFL lockout, and both disputes were resolved at the bargaining table. The Supreme Court had already held in Brown v. Pro Football (1996) that the labor exemption continues to protect leagues after bargaining reaches impasse. That leaves decertification as the players' main route to antitrust court.

The revenue-share fights Quinn predicted have defined recent bargaining. The NFL's current agreement runs through the 2030 season and added a 17th game along with a higher player share. The NBA's agreement introduced stricter "apron" limits on the highest-spending teams. Baseball's 2021–22 lockout ended with an agreement that expires in December 2026, and owners formally proposed a $245.3 million salary cap and $171.2 million floor in May 2026, which the players' union rejected. The NHL has had no stoppage since its 2012–13 lockout and in 2025 extended its agreement through the 2029–30 season. Player health has become central to bargaining and litigation, from the NFL concussion settlement to expanded medical protocols. After the Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Murphy v. NCAA opened the door to state-legalized sports betting, gambling became a major revenue source and a new integrity concern. Quinn's prediction about international growth has largely held: the NFL now plays regular-season games on several continents, and the NBA has continued to expand abroad. The league networks Quinn describes have changed too: in 2026 ESPN acquired NFL Network, with the NFL taking a 10 percent stake in ESPN, and regional networks such as the Yankees' and Knicks' YES and MSG are moving their streaming to DAZN. Owners and players both describe their leagues as more valuable than ever, which is one more sign that competition for players did not ruin these sports.