The Roots of Donald Trump’s Beef With the NFL
Donald Trump’s beef with the NFL recently may stem from Colin Kaepernick and players kneeling in front of the flag, or it may have a little something to do with with his failed attempt at creating a rival league. Per usual there is always more to the Donald Trump story than what he presents on twitter.
July 30th 1986 the USFL wins an anti-trust law suit against the NFL. Donald Trump was the main plaintiff seeking damages for more than 1 billion dollars. While the jury agreed that the NFL was a monopoly, the jury also believed that the USFL’s biggest problems resulted from self inflicted wounds, bad management, strategy, and implementation. The lawsuit effectually killed the the league and Donald Trump’s chance at bringing what he believed to be a lucrative merger to the NFL.
Fast forward to 2014 and the Buffalo Bills are for sale. Trump boasted that he had bid $1Billion dollars for the franchise but ultimately was outbid by Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula by nearly a half a billion dollars. There were also rumblings around the league that the NFL wanted to dig into Trump’s finances a bit more than he was comfortable with which was another factor in him not getting the team, but to be clear we can’t confirm or deny this as true.
What we do know is that Trump tried and failed to get into the NFL on multiple occasions. To his credit, he is now the President of the United States, which may not be as profitable as owning an NFL team, the title holds a bit more weight. President or no President, Donald Trump seems like he can hold a grudge and get “House Wives of Whatever the Hell City” petty, evidenced by every other tweet on his timeline. Trump finally can tell the NFL to go “F” itself and not have to worry about not being invited to the NFL owners’ round table, he now sits at the round table of world leaders. The title of his new office will not stop him from rubbing a little dirt in the eye of the NFL when he can, and he is, and he will, and he won’t stop until he’s got all the venom from the last 30 plus years.
If you ask me, this tweet storm of poop Donald Trump is dumping on the NFL is as much about revenge as it is about the flag or race. This is Trump’s high school reunion moment, where he comes back looking like “The Rock” in Central Intelligence in front of all those mean NFL owners who laughed at him before.
President Donald Trump set off a firestorm last Friday when he urged NFL owners to fire players who used the national anthem as an opportunity for protest. He doubled down this morning, suggesting a boycott of the NFL. Team owners have been quick to line up against Trump and support their players.
This isn’t the first time Trump has picked a fight with the NFL. And last time around, he lost spectacularly.
Trump’s football adventure began in 1984, when he bought the New Jersey Generals, part of the then-new United States Football League. The USFL, as chronicled in an excellent installment of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, was envisioned by founder David Dixon as a complement to the National Football League that would play in the spring, leaving fall to the NFL. For its first three years, the strategy seemed successful.
But it wasn’t enough for Trump. He pushed hard to shift the USFL to a fall schedule, where the USFL – with less talent and less public awareness – would go head-to-head with the bigger league.
The decision to switch to fall play immediately crippled several USFL teams, who wouldn’t be able to compete directly with local NFL teams. The league even turned down a lifeline in the form of lucrative TV offers to broadcast spring games.
But Trump’s plan was typically audacious and risky. Rather than organically grow a new league, he hoped to force an immediate merger with the NFL, which would provide huge returns for surviving USFL team owners. That goal hinged in part on an antitrust lawsuit alleging the NFL was an unlawful monopoly.
But things didn’t go Trump’s way. While the USFL technically won the antitrust case, the jury concluded mismanagement was mostly at fault for its problems. There was no merger and no buyouts. By 1986, the USFL was finished.
Steve
Steve is an affordable multifamily housing professional that is also the co-founder of Whiskey Congress. Steve has written for national publications such as The National Marijuana News and other outlets as a guest blogger on topics covering sports, politics, and cannabis. Steve loves whiskey, cigars, and uses powerlifting as an outlet to deal with the fact that no one listens to his brilliant ideas.
