Oakland Suing Raiders, NFL For Leaving City, Secures Legal Team: Report

The city of Oakland, California, has reportedly secured a legal team and will announce the details of their lawsuit against the Raiders this week.

The Oakland Raiders are set to relocate to Las Vegas and play their games at the new 65,000 capacity Las Vegas Stadium from the 2020 season onward after it was approved by NFL owners last year.

However, that move, to Las Vegas at least, could happen as early as next season as the Oakland City Council authorized a multimillion-dollar antitrust lawsuit against the NFL and the Raiders last month which could result in winning damages of $500 million.

The reason for the lawsuit is the franchise's departure with claims such as the NFL league owners colluding to create a boycott of Oakland, with a vote of 31-1 approving the move.

The move also leaves the city with the unrenovated Oakland Alameda County Coliseum, where the Raiders currently play, with a $75 million bond debt for renovating the stadium still outstanding.

And according to NBC Bay Area news anchor Raj Mathai, the lawsuit is finally set to move forward this week. Lead outside attorney James Quinn of Berg & Androphy, who has successfully sued the league in the past, is likely to take the case forward.

Mathai notes that the Raiders have already announced they will leave Oakland a season in advance if a lawsuit was filed, where they could potentially play their home games at the 35,500 capacity Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas for the 2019 season.

In addition, a successful lawsuit for Oakland could see the city keep the Raiders name.

However, there are doubts as to whether a lawsuit would be feasible for Oakland, according to legal experts, particularly as their arguments go against an antitrust violation.

“It’s sort of the reverse of what you’d normally expect,” Washington attorney Stuart Paynter, who teaches antitrust and sports law at Duke University, said last month. “Often, you’d see an owner trying to move somewhere and the league restraining him — that’d be a more obvious antitrust theory. Here, from an antitrust perspective, nothing really leaps out as an easy and obvious case."

“The Raiders’ move to Las Vegas did not involve a collective territorial restraint,” Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business law professor Marc Edelman added. “Rather, it involved just the opposite. The NFL did nothing to prevent the team from moving to the city where they perceived the greatest market demand."

"The fact that a team is able to leave its home territory to go to a different territory of its choice is generally seen as favorable to antitrust,” Edelman​ said.

Mathai was at Wembley Stadium where the Raiders played the first of three NFL London Games taking place this month as they suffered a crushing 27-3 loss to the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday to take their record for the season to 1-5.

They will host the Indianapolis Colts on Oct. 28 next.