Before Trump made his way to Atlantic City he aspired to own an NFL football team but the league wasn’t interested in his participation. Even most recently Trump tried to buy the Buffalo Bills but the Sabres owner outbid him with a price of $1.4 billion dollars.
Trump’s foray into the world of sports has been notoriously blotted with disappointment. He held several big fights at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City until that casino was closed. He operates 17 golf courses around the world, but the PGA refuses to hold events at his location because of Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants. And his golf club in Puerto Rico just filed for bankruptcy.
But it was back in the early 1980’s when an eager Trump bought the franchise to the New Jersey Generals, a team within the United States Football League, the USFL. The first season of the USFL saw a $20 Million contract with ABC Sports and another lucrative deal with then startup cable channel ESPN. The ratings were decent and attendance was fair. The 12 teams averaged just over 25,000 people per game and the league was marketed as the fun league, unlike the NFL, because players at the USFL were encouraged to celebrate touchdowns.
But as soon as Trump owned the team he started bashing it for being a springtime event and tried to move it to the fall. He provided quotes like “If God had wanted football in the spring, he wouldn’t have created baseball,” and saying that spring football was for losers.
John Bassett, owner of the USFL team the Tampa Bay Bandits warned Trump that an attempt to move the games to the fall would have apocalyptic repercussions. Sure enough though by 1986 Trump had enough USFL owners in his pocket to gain a 12 to 2 vote to move the games to a fall schedule.
But Trump’s next move would seal the fate of the USFL forever. With Roy Cohn by his side Trump announced a $1.7 billion dollar antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, claiming they held a chokehold on national TV rights. The trial lasted 42 days and ended with a jury ruling in favor of the USFL, declaring the NFL a monopoly.
Sounds great for Trump right? Guess again cause during the trial the NFL exposed Trump’s real plan to force a merger, get even richer, and acquire an NFL franchise for virtually nothing. It was exposed that the USFL was a league controlled and dominated solely by one man...Donald Trump and that he alone orchestrated the trial to make a financial killing.
In turn the jury decided that because the USFL wasn’t playing at the time of the lawsuit and more importantly that the expenditures the USFL laid out in order to compete with the NFL contributed to the USFL’s own demise; the jury concluded that the league’s dire straights were largely a result of its own doing, not the NFL’s, and so awarded the USFL damages totaling $1 dollar. Since damages in antitrust cases are tripled, the award grew to a whopping $3.
The USFL appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which took four more years and resulted in the higher court allowing the award to stand, plus interest, requiring the NFL write a check to the USFL for $3.76. Of course since the NFL did loose they legitimately had to pay the USFL attorney fees, which meant Roy Cohn and lawyer Harvey Myerson had a payday to the tune of $6 million dollars. But the USFL never played again.
Some good did come out of all this. After the league folded 187 players moved over to the NFL and because of the competition from the USFL salaries tripled within three years.
If you want to find out more about how Donald Trump’s ego destroyed the lives of many investors and ruined an entire franchise, there is a great documentary on Netflix called “Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?” The documentary name comes from Trump’s response when asked to give an interview many years later calling the USFL “small potatoes”. It’s a fascinating look into Trump’s greed and ego that leads to the downfall and unemployment of so many that were dedicated to a new football league.
