Players’ Union Assails NFL’s Plans for PAC

The union representing National Football League players is assailing recently disclosed plans by the league to establish a political unit to contribute cash to Congressional candidates friendly to NFL causes.

Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, called the league’s plans to set up a political action committee a thinly-veiled effort to funnel money to candidates favorable to granting the NFL protection from federal anti-trust laws.

“What they’re doing is just trying to influence something they want in Congress and that’s the anti-trust exemption,” Upshaw said. “They’re using every avenue they can to get that exemption through. They’re using this hoping they can elect the type of people to political office who will support their position.”

Political action committees, known as PACs, are independent committees formed to donate money to Congressional and presidential candidates.

The Federal Election Commission last month erected a road block to the NFL’s plans, ruling unanimously that the league, because it is not an incorporated entity, could not use money from its treasury to set up the PAC, tentatively called the NFLPAC. The FEC ruling does not prevent the NFL from finding outside sources of money to set up the PAC.

The FEC did say, however, that the individual owners of the 28 NFL clubs could set up PACs of their own.

The NFL is downplaying its plans for a PAC.

League spokesman Joe Browne said, “The idea of forming a PAC has been a low priority item that has been discussed informally from time to time in the past. Political giving over the years has been a decision left up to the individual clubs and I would expect that this would be the case in the future.”

But, belying Brown’s statement is the fact that the league has been focusing thousands of dollars in an intense lobbying campaign for legislation in both houses on Congress that would grant the NFL a limited shield from anti-trust laws to stop city-hopping by adventurous team owners.

A spate of bills would give the NFL and other sports leagues the power to stop moves such as the Baltimore Colts’ switch to Indianapolis and the Oakland Raiders jump to Los Angeles. Critics of the legislation say that it would only strengthen an organization that is already a monopoly.

Another issue that the NFL has declared of vital concern to itself is the Reagan tax plan that strips the tax deduction status of tickets to events bought by corporations. Some teams said corporate sponsors will stop buying tickets in droves if they are not able to declare them a business deduction.

Doug Allen, the secretary-treasurer of the Federation of Professional Athletes, an umbrella labor group for the NFL, United States Football League and the Major Indoor Soccer League, also had sharp words for the NFL’s PAC.

Under federal election laws, individuals can donate $1,000 to candidates in primary and general elections, while PACs can donate five times that amount.

“You can cut through a lot of the smoke and the mirrors and what it all boils down to is that the NFL is trying to set up a PAC so it can contribute more money to Congressional candidates and Senate candidates than they have in the past,” said Allen, who is also the executive director of the USFL’s Players Association.

“The money for this comes from the sports fan,” Allen said. “This doesn’t mean that a part of his ticket price is now going to go to politics. It means that more of it is going to go to politics because they’ve been spending a lot of it already up on the Hill.”

NFL lawyers reacted causticly to the FEC’s decision to sidetrack plans to use league money to set up a league PAC.

“The commission almost always acts in an arbitray fashion,” said league lawyer John Bolton.

For the sake of federal election laws, Bolton argued that the NFL -- a “unique, novel organization” -- be treated as a trade association, which is what he called the “closest anaolgy” to what the league is. Each of the member clubs are corporations, while the NFL, as an association of the teams, is not.

The FEC’s Sharon Snyder said, “It’s not as established fact that they are a trade association -- that’s their contention. We treated them as an unicorporated organization. They are by their own words unincorporated.”