Mr. Rothenberg is Los Angeles Chairman of 1st Century Bank, a division of MidFirst Bank and Chairman of Premier Partnerships. Rothenberg spearheaded soccer’s rise in the U.S. during the 1990s as Chairman and CEO of the 1994 World Cup; Chairman of the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup; President of the U.S. Soccer Federation; Chairman of the U.S. Soccer Foundation; and founder of Major League Soccer. For his accomplishments, FIFA bestowed upon him its coveted Order of Merit and he was inducted into the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame. Rothenberg was also a top executive in the NBA during the 1970s and 1980s. While serving as Vice President and General Counsel of Jack Kent Cooke, Inc. and California Sports, Inc., he represented the Lakers on the NBA’s Board of Governors from 1971-79, and was a member of the Board of Governors during his tenure as President of the Clippers from 1982-90. In his legal career, he was managing partner of Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips and a partner in Latham & Watkins before he retired in 2000.
Shayna Toh sat down with Mr. Rothenberg to speak to him about his early work, bringing soccer to America, and his thoughts on the future of the legal landscape of sports.
Shayna Toh: Did you always know that you wanted to go into sports law?
Alan Rothenberg: When I was in law school there was no such thing as sports law. I wanted to be a litigator because that was the only thing I knew from watching movies and television. I was a sports lawyer before there were sports lawyers.
When I graduated from law school, I worked for a major law firm as a litigator, and it just so happened that they represented the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers who later became the owner of the Washington Redskins (now Washington Commanders), and he wanted to have a right-hand man inside as general counsel. At that time, managing professional sports teams was very unsophisticated. There were no huge TV or labor contracts, people weren’t building arenas or stadiums, and it didn’t take more than knowledge of the sport to be in charge of the team. Managing the team was separated into sports and business – owners of teams often had to talk to lawyers, accountants, and executives. They were going through a transition period, and I bridged the gap by getting more involved on the sports side.
Nowadays, there are so many opportunities in sports for lawyers. It’s important as a law student to know what you want to do. While many people are big sports fans, working in sports is more than just the glamor of sports of it; it’s hard work. At the same time, it’s interesting work because it’s general in nature, and there are so many ways to do it. You can go into a law firm with a lot of sports clients, you can get a job with a team or the league, you can join a TV network or advertising agency. If you’re interested, there are multiple vehicles to pursue this.
Toh: Do you feel like the sports landscape has changed so much so that your career path back then might be hard to replicate now? Are there too many barriers to entry now?
Rothenberg: I don’t think there are barriers to entry because there are so many more entry points today. If you’re really interested in sports as a career, it would help to narrow it: do you like the player side or management side? The media side or the financial side? There are so many big organizations and almost all of them have internships. I always tell everybody to grab anything you can. If you do a good job, you’ll either be promoted or somebody will discover you and you’re on your way. There’s no substitute for good hard work.
I grew up in Detroit (hockey town) as a big sports fan. I was aware there was something called soccer in the rest of the world, but soccer wasn’t where I was. In 1967, Jack Kent Cooke, who was the owner of one of the teams I described, decided to start a professional soccer league, and asked me to join him. I was 28, and I had never seen, played, or coached a soccer game. That venture happened too early and only lasted for two years.
In the 1970s, it looked like the sport was taking off. In Los Angeles, a group of us decided it was the right time to start a partnership, but it still lost a lot of money, and we ended up selling it.
Things really changed when the Olympics came to LA in 1984. Peter Ueberroth, who ran the Olympics, wanted to make sure that the people involved in our community were involved in the Olympics. He came up with the concept of having a Commissioner for every sport, and asked me to do that for the soccer tournament. I agreed primarily because soccer, even to this day, was the best organized sport internationally because of its size, so I knew it would be a lighter lift.
Soccer at the Olympics turned out to be a huge success, and that’s when FIFA decided it was safe to bring the World Cup to the United States. I became the President of the United States Soccer Federation to run the World Cup. While getting involved in soccer was really an accident for me, I was able to call on my managerial experience in sports and put it to good use.
Toh: Did you have a sense that once soccer came to America, the public would open up to it? What were the difficulties opening the American market up to soccer and how did you get around that?
Rothenberg: The American public loves a big event. I knew that if we could convince them this was a big event, it would be a must-see thing. While we would have tourists coming in from Europe or Latin America, where soccer was a religion, I had to convince the Americans that it was a big deal. We wrapped the games with a lot of entertainment events to get people’s interest, all of which was a first for FIFA because they’d only ever operated in soccer-crazed countries where they didn’t have to do that. Part of my pitch used to be: “There are 209 members of FIFA, and 209 members of the United Nations. If you told all the countries they could only be a member of one, all but 5 or 6 would choose FIFA and not the United Nations.”
I tried to explain that you’ll never see the type of fan fervor as you do in the World Cup. Even in the Olympics, you don’t see the same type of passion as the fans with painted faces waving flags. A lot of work was in exposing the general public to the sport and marketing it as an event that you can’t miss.
Toh: What happened when you came up against people who might have thought that you couldn’t pull it off? Were you ever concerned about that impact on your career?
Rothenberg: I never left my law firm. They thought it was good to have me doing this, especially because we were running this as a non-profit. I was not independently wealthy enough to have left my law firm just to do this, and I don’t know if I would have taken that risk.
I was probably over-confident that it would succeed, but we were also careful in the budgeting, and it was a challenge to do so as we didn’t have any money up front and had to get a line of credit. We took advantage of fervent soccer fans and had an early ticket sale for them on a limited basis, and that set the tone of tickets getting sold out right away with a high demand. There were a ton of challenges, but they all worked out.
Toh: Besides soccer, you’ve also worked as legal counsel for the Lakers and as President of the Clippers. How has wearing multiple hats informed your work and strategy in each role?
Rothenberg: I got a lot of varied experiences in and out of sports. The best case of putting them together in terms of legal knowledge and my experience was when I started Major League Soccer. I formed that as a single-league entity due to my legal knowledge of how the NBA was sued by the National Basketball Players Association under the antitrust laws. There was a great vulnerability here because the League was started by a group of club owners, who were by definition a group of competitors deciding to carve out the market—a per se violation of antitrust laws.
This challenge really made me put all my years of various experiences together. I remember talking to David Stern about an old case involving General Motors and one of its divisions where they fixed prices. The Supreme Court ruled the division was part of the entity of General Motors, not a separate entity, therefore there was no conspiracy. We realized that if these Leagues were formed as a single entity, the teams would all just be operators under the corporation, and that would be safe under the antitrust laws.
Therefore, MLS started as a single-league entity which allowed us to put controls in which we couldn’t put in otherwise. The League owns all the players and allocates them to the teams. The League dictates what the sponsorship categories are and that they’re exclusive to the League, which means the teams can’t enter into sponsorships on their own. From a legal antitrust and control-of-product basis, that has worked. This was tested in court, we won the lawsuit, the Supreme Court denied cert for an appeal, and that’s the established law today. Ever since then, all the other Leagues that have popped up have followed this pattern.
Toh: What’s the commonality across all the positions you hold now?
Rothenberg: I’m at a different phase of my life now, so it’s about if I like it and if I like the people. Earlier in my life, I was opportunistic, and if something that looked good came up in front of me, I would say, “Why not?” But I also always had my law practice while I worked on other projects on the side. With the Lakers, I was their lawyer. With the Clippers, even though I was President, I acted as their outside lawyer and did everything from the law office. I never gave up the law practice; I always enjoyed practicing law.
Back then, I was also a generalist. While I was a litigator, I did a bit of everything, which is what you have to do as general counsel of a league. People always ask me: “What’s the one thing you loved doing more than anything else?” And I always tell them: trying jury cases.
Toh: What are your thoughts on the upcoming World Cup? What do you think are the biggest challenges?
Rothenberg: There are two parts: sports and business. For the sports part, it’s going to be the most awesome fan-experience ever. It’s so big and great—there’ll be more games, more teams, and now we have more than enough knowledgeable soccer fans so it’s going to become a spectacular success. There will be so many fan festivals and watch parties—it’ll be a party for a straight month.
Financially, it will be a challenge because FIFA changed the system. When we did it in in 1994, FIFA kept the international sponsorship, marketing, and media rights, but turned everything else over to us. We had a centralized organization which meant we had all the risks and rewards. Now, FIFA has given almost no opportunities to local host cities for the revenue. All the different host cities are scrambling to come up with money to take care of their costs—they’re thinking about tourism, hospitality, and sponsorships, but it’s not open the way it was in 1994.
The host cities will be fortunate to break even, but they’re still doing it. Some cities, like New York, don’t need the exposure to put them on the map, but for a Kansas City, fans from every country will be coming in and their city will be telecasted around the world. Fans will be paying for hotel rooms, restaurants, bars, etc. There’s a real value for all these cities to encourage tourism.
Toh: The nature of the sports world seems to be ever-changing and ever-growing. How should someone who wants to join this world prepare themselves?
Rothenberg: Because you’ll never know what to expect, a lot of it is doing your job and reacting to what happens in front of you. As busy as law students are, as early as possible, get attached to some parts of the sports industry as an intern as it gives you some exposure. They’re so many people who are fans and are interested, but what employers want is to test the depth of the interest that you have. Put in time as a volunteer or intern to get some exposure so your career decisions become a bit more knowledgeable and informed. Keep doing things. They want people who are serious about the work.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.