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GOAL! Latham Scores Complete Jury Trial Verdict in High-Profile Antitrust Dispute for U.S. Soccer
February 5, 2025
Trial team defeats long-running New York federal case that challenged U.S. Soccer’s authority to govern professional soccer in the US.
On February 3, 2025, Latham & Watkins resoundingly defeated North American Soccer League (NASL) on behalf of our client, the U.S. Soccer Federation in a high-profile antitrust action. In a suit originally filed in the Eastern District of New York in 2017, NASL claimed that U.S. Soccer conspired with co-defendant Major League Soccer (represented by Proskauer) to exclude NASL from Division I and Division II professional soccer and to monopolize these markets through the application of U.S. Soccer’s Professional League Standards.
Following a three-week trial, which began on January 13, 2025, and featured several high-profile witnesses including MLS Commissioner Don Garber, sports owner Clark Hunt, and former NBA great Carmelo Anthony, Latham and Proskauer successfully persuaded a 10-person New York jury to find unanimously in favor of U.S. Soccer and Major League Soccer (MLS). The jury took approximately 90 minutes to return its verdict, which rejected NASL’s proposed relevant market definition as a threshold issue.
Notably, although there were three weeks of testimony, defendants were able to present their defense-in-chief to the jury in less than one day. Since certain key witnesses testified during plaintiff’s case, U.S. Soccer and MLS made the strategic decision to call no live witnesses (including experts) and instead played video testimony from various former NASL owners and executives that bolstered the defense.
At closing, counsel for U.S. Soccer and MLS highlighted that NASL’s market definition was contradicted by prelitigation business records, that their clients did not conspire regarding NASL, that NASL failed to provide any direct evidence of the alleged conspiracy, and that NASL's failures were of the league's own making.
The Latham & Watkins team for U.S. Soccer was led by partners Chris Yates and Larry Buterman and included partners Anna Rathbun and Aaron Chiu, counsel Joseph Axelrad, and associates David Johnson, Ehson Kashfipour, Christine Greeley, Robert Medina, Alex Siemers, Emily J. Viola, Lei Samanta Brutus, Hanna Nunez Tse, Kristina McKenna, Evan Omi, and Molly Barron.