There are a couple of things I wanted to briefly comment on (but don’t necessarily warrant a full post at this time):

GAMBLING:

Chief among them, is the ruling from the Supreme Court this morning which has overturned the federal law on sports gambling. You can read the ruling here, but the tl;dr summary is: if the federal government wants to regulate something (assuming they have the power to do so in the first place), the Supremes told them to do it themdamnselves. They can’t impose on the states the requirement to set up and enforce a regulatory scheme. It’s called the anti-commandeering principle, which is actually (shockingly) concisely outlined by the court.

So with that in mind, I’m obviously interested as to how MLS handles this. Are we about to see “bet334.com” kit sponsorships? How will this affect fantasy sports (which we know MLS is really interested in)? Locally, how will the Sounders take this news. They’ve been working to leverage a new kit sponsorship for some time now. Maybe I’ll put in an interview request…

SOUNDERS:

Sticking with the Sounders beat, Geoff Baker is out with a story which purports to argue that the Sounders rank low on the use of funds on player salaries versus their revenues. I’ll leave it to others to analyze that, but this is what caught my eye:

The Sounders re-upped their lease until 2028 back in 2015. The terms obviously weren’t disclosed, but it’s been long rumored that as a part of Paul Allen’s favorable ownership deal, that the Sounders obtained a good deal on the rent at CenturyLink Field. One presumes that included keeping a good percentage of concessions/parking/etc., but that has never been outlined. As part of my series on stadium leases, perhaps I’ll try to find out.

NASL V. USSF/MLS

Finally, NASL this morning publicly confirmed the news I broke last Friday that the USSF/MLS are NOT filing a motion to dismiss in the anti-trust case, and as such, the discovery process will go forward. You can imagine there were some discussions after this filing came down, as it went against what everyone thought was going to happen. You can check out my story on the answer filed by the defendants to get some flavor on what they filed. Next step is the status conference; hopefully we will know soon when that takes place.