The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed Relevent Sports’ antitrust case against U.S. Soccer and FIFA to proceed, keeping alive the possibility that regular season matches between foreign clubs could take place on U.S. soil.
The justices on Monday sided with the Biden Administration’s earlier recommendation to not get involved in the matter, thus allowing a lower court’s ruling reviving the case to stand.
The case is active and pending in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where it may soon move forward without FIFA as a co-defendant.
New York-based event promoter Relevent Sports, backed by billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, has long accused the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) and FIFA of conspiring to prevent the promoter from hosting regular season matches between foreign clubs in the U.S. The suit alleged that this violates U.S. antitrust law designed to prevent unjust collusion or monopolies.
FIFA, USSF and Relevent did not immediately respond to questions on Monday.
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The matter has crawled through U.S. courts since it was filed in 2019, and in recent months picked up steam as the Supreme Court considered reviewing the matter. The case is pending, with the next status conference scheduled for October.
Last week, Relevent Sports wrote in a letter to Judge Valerie E. Caproni that the promoter reached a resolution with FIFA to drop the sport’s global governing body as a defendant in the suit. If adopted, this resolution would leave USSF as the sole defendant in the case.
The USSF later asked the court to require that Relevent provide a copy of its settlement with FIFA for review, but Relevent and FIFA said in separate filings that they would like to keep their agreement close to the chest.
In a letter filed with the court on Friday, Relevent’s lawyer Jeffrey L. Kessler said his client “should not be required to divulge the contents of its confidential settlement agreement with FIFA.” He later added that, should the court mandate the agreement be provided, that it remain confidential and for “attorneys’ eyes only” because the agreement contains “highly sensitive information which, if disclosed, may cause competitive harm, or . . . could reasonably threaten significant harm to that party’s business interests.”
FIFA’s desire to be removed from the legal dispute could very well be an effort to keep itself out of the court’s very public reach. In July, the court ordered that “fact discovery” in the matter be completed by September. In a court filing on April 1, Relevent said it reached an agreement with USSF, and was nearing agreement with FIFA on materials that would be requested for discovery. FIFA and Relevent’s agreement to drop FIFA as a defendant came days later.
Relevent left the door open to relaunching a legal case at any point, by asking the court to dismiss the claims between the parties “without prejudice.”
(Photo: Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
