Impact of Antitrust Laws on the Four American Professional Sports

Since the advance of the first piece of antitrust legislation in the 1890s,antitrust law has considerably impacted the business of professional sports.Particularly,in the past forty years individual players and player unions as well as competing leagues and team owners have disputed restrictive professional league policies on free agency,salary spending,franchise ownership and monopoly power.These challenges were made with the use of antitrust law theory.What follows is a brief review of a few cases involving four professional team sports and antitrust law and an analysis of the impact of such cases on the structure of professional team sports in the United States.