City of Oakland v. Oakland Raiders, No. 20-16075 (9th Cir. 2021)
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The City of Oakland sued the NFL and its member teams, alleging that the defendants created artificial scarcity in their product (NFL teams), and used that scarcity to demand supra-competitive prices from host cities. The city alleged that when it could not pay those prices, the defendants punished it by allowing the Raiders to move to Las Vegas.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the case. While the city had Article III standing because it plausibly alleged that, but for the defendants’ conduct, it would have retained the Raiders, the defendants’ conduct did not amount to an unreasonable restraint of trade under section 1 of the Sherman Act. The city failed sufficiently to allege a group boycott, which occurs when multiple producers refuse to sell goods or services to a particular customer, alleging only that a single producer, the Raiders, refused to deal with it. The city also failed sufficiently to allege statutory standing on a theory that the defendants’ conduct constituted an unlawful horizontal price-fixing scheme. A finding of antitrust standing requires balancing the nature of the plaintiff’s alleged injury, the directness of the injury, the speculative measure of the harm, the risk of duplicative recovery, and the complexity in apportioning damages; here, the city was priced out of the market and was a nonpurchaser. Any damages were highly speculative and would be exceedingly difficult to calculate.