Game On

In June, for the second consecutive year, the Florida Panthers clinched the National Hockey League (NHL) championship, beating the Edmonton Oilers 4 games to 2. Amid the cheers and the tears, Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov skated up to receive the Stanley Cup from NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman ’77, who has the enviable task every year of awarding one of the most storied trophies in professional sports. 

Bettman’s path to the NHL started at NYU Law, where his classes with professors Daniel Collins and T.G.S. Christensen—both prominent labor arbitrators—honed his skills in labor law. His first job after graduation was at the firm now known as Proskauer Rose, which represented the National Basketball Association (NBA); that connection ultimately led to an in-house position at the NBA. Bettman became general counsel before the age of 30.

“It was exciting. I was flying all over the country and…working with lawyers twice my age,” Bettman recalls of his early days. He suspects it was his acumen in developing salary caps at the NBA that drew the interest of the NHL, which appointed him commissioner in 1993.

In the past 50 years, the business of sports—and with it, the practice of sports law—has exploded in scope and diversity. Once primarily the domain of labor, antitrust, contract, and IP lawyers, sports-related law practice now encompasses cybersecurity, private equity, and mergers and acquisitions. Amid this expansion, a significant roster of NYU Law alumni has served as leaders and trailblazers in professional sports management and ownership. They include—in addition to Bettman—former National Football League Commissioner Paul Tagliabue ’65; Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross LLM ’66; Minnesota Vikings owners Leonard Wilf LLM ’77 and Mark Wilf ’87; and Jamila Wideman ’03, general manager (GM) of the WNBA Washington Mystics.

Sports law as an ongoing academic focus area at NYU Law dates back to 2009, when Arthur R. Miller, University Professor and Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts, established the NYU Sports and Society Program. Three years later he began teaching NYU Law’s first sports law class.

“Big firms thought it was beneath them, the way matrimonial [law] was beneath them, so it was not a career path. But then, when I got to NYU, I realized, ‘My God, this law school is in New York City, which is the center of world sports, and at that time it didn’t even have a sports law class,’” Miller says. In 2016, he brought in Jodi Balsam ’86, former National Football League counsel for operations and litigation, to co-teach with him. She took over the class in 2021.

Today’s sports law arena offers vastly more opportunities for lawyers than even a few years ago, according to Balsam—in part due to an overall shift in media consumption patterns. “Sports is outpunching movies [in growth and profitability] because it is one of the last few redoubts of linear television content,” she explains. “You must watch it as it is happening. You can’t timeshift.…You can’t delay its value. That makes it the single most valuable set of intellectual property content to license for your television distribution panel.” 

Combine this with the legalization of online gaming and expanded access to fantasy leagues, and the pull to the screen is even stronger. “I have had a team in an NFL fantasy league for years, and I’m also a Giants fan. If the Giants were my only hook, I’d stop watching football about midway through the season. But I’m glued to the TV through the end of the season because of fantasy,” Balsam adds.

“Everything is more complex than it used to be. The reality that’s been around for a long time is that you can’t run a team or a league without some pretty snazzy legal advice. Now the stakes are staggeringly higher,” says Miller. “Joe DiMaggio never earned more than $100,000 a year playing baseball.”

This complexity—and potential for profitability—has drawn more large law firms into this space. “Sports is a hot sector at the moment, so lots of firms are flooding into it,” says Michael Kuh ’03, New York managing partner and a leading sports lawyer at Hogan Lovells. Kuh has recently worked on the North American bid for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, as well as Arctos Sports Partners’ first-ever private equity investment into the NBA, the acquisition of an interest in the Golden State Warriors.

“At Hogan Lovells, we were in the right place at the right time. Most of us in the practice started off our careers as private equity lawyers with a background in sports. Sports was almost our side hustle. But once the doors of team ownership opened to private equity, we were a natural choice to help sort out what this would all look like,” Kuh says.

Investment opportunities in sports attracted Bob Gold ’84, managing partner of Clara Vista Investment Partners, which in 2024 acquired the British EFL Championship League team Ipswich Town F.C. “Sports has been probably the best performing asset class over the last 15 years,” he says. “But the other thing about sports investing is it actually performs well in bad times, because fans keep going to games and there is no slowdown in broadcasting games. Media companies need to keep buying the rights.”

“Everything is more complex than it used to be...Now the stakes are staggeringly higher.”

Arthur R. Miller

Gold credits his legal training as giving him an edge with the myriad issues professional sports ownership presents. “The deals are multiparty and have long histories to them, and bringing lawyerly analytic skills and lawyerly understanding is extremely valuable,” he says.

For Lenny Wilf, it was the expertise in tax law that he developed at NYU Law—in particular in classes with Professor Guy Maxfield—that set him up to assess the tax implications of all aspects of the family business, both sports management and real estate. But NYU Law also came through for him in other ways, he says. In 2005, the Wilfs needed the approval of then–NFL Commissioner Tagliabue to purchase the Vikings.

“We were waiting for him at the Carlyle Hotel for breakfast,” Wilf recalls, “and he walks in, and says, ‘Which one is Leonard?’ It turned out that then–Dean Richard Revesz had written a letter of recommendation that mentioned Wilf’s support for scholarship students. Tagliabue had himself received a scholarship at the Law School. “It’s a lesson in life that when you do something good you should never expect anything in return—but the cycle of life often returns the favor,” Wilf says.

In recent years, the Wilfs have expanded into the growing sphere of professional soccer, becoming majority owners in 2021 of the Major League Soccer Orlando City Soccer Club as well as the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) 2024 champion team, the Orlando Pride. That same year Ted Segal ’09, founder of real estate development firm EJS, acquired two professional soccer teams, the MLS Houston Dynamo and the NWSL Houston Dash. “I come from a family of engineers. I’m the one lawyer in the family,” says Segal. “Particularly at NYU, you are taught and you develop the skills to analyze an issue from a variety of perspectives and to unpack those issues. There’s no facet of sports that isn’t touched by the law.”

In addition to private equity ownership, Balsam sees key growth areas for sports and sports law in the expansion of women’s professional sports, the opportunities that will develop from the emergence of AI, and in particular the new NCAA policy around name, image, and likeness (NIL), which allows college athletes to receive financial compensation for promotional endeavors. Wideman, who played for the WNBA and also served as senior vice president of player development at the NBA before becoming GM of the Mystics, agrees. “I wish the NIL had existed when I was in college! But I think there is a twin sense of incredible pride that the level and the quality of the game that women are playing now is improved and just extraordinary to see… and watching the level of investment in the last, say, five years increase, and how quickly that has translated into just a massive leap in terms of the visibility of the league,” Wideman says.

These new frontiers of sports-related legal practice are also stirring excitement among the next generation. Nadia Nelson ’26, who decided to go to law school after studying sports management as an undergraduate, sees the new NIL policies as an opportunity for lawyers to provide valuable guidance and protection for student athletes. “A lot of my peers from all different socioeconomic backgrounds are getting the chance to attend college through athletic programs, hoping to go pro and support themselves and their families. NIL is exciting because now agents and companies are reaching out to students,” says Nelson. “I am interested in how lawyers will engage with NIL policies and find ways to protect these young athletes. As lawyers, we are trained to think critically about issues that may not be immediately obvious but are important and can shape the kinds of opportunities that these athletes will have in the future.”

One way that NYU Law students interested in sports law can convene and network with leaders in the industry is through the NYU Law Sports Law Association, which was started in 2015 and draws in leaders in the field for panel discussions and an annual symposium.

“All of the [sports] league offices are in New York, so your avenues to get into sports are really helped by being here,” says Max Schneider ’25, former president of the Sports Law Association, who spent his 3L summer interning at Major League Baseball. “Every time we have a colloquium, 13 people take the time outof their day to talk about their careers. I think that makes the pathway into it seem a little more attainable, because it’s a hard industry to break into.” While Schneider, who joined Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, will not begin his career in sports practice, he hopes the firm’s strength in labor law, corporate law, and private equity dealmaking will position him well for sports-related deal work down the road.

Indeed, Balsam will concede that while she teaches the class and has written the book—Sports and the Law: Text, Cases, and Problems, now in its seventh edition—there really isn’t any such thing as “sports law” beyond a snowballing collection of practice areas. From an academic standpoint, she views that as part of the appeal. “Believe it or not, sports law offers some of the most interesting intellectual challenges of just about any current industry,” she says, noting that this doesn’t always involve doctrinal legal questions. “Sports cases often ask us to rethink what we know about law or economics or society,” she says.

And then, of course, there’s the fun factor.

“You have the owner’s experience—you sit in the owner’s box, go into the locker room before the game, and can walk on the field,” says Gold, who adds that his investment in Ipswich Town has brought his family a connection around the team. “We’ll watch the games or we do watch parties at the Empire Legends bar on 33rd Street. Everyone wears their jersey… It’s not like owning a B2B software company.”

The thrill never wanes, Bettman says, even after 32 years of presenting the same trophy. “The best part is when I present it, I’m on the ice with the players,” he says of the moment when he hands over the Stanley Cup. “All I am is an observer, but being able to see that level of excitement, of emotion, of relief, is about as good as it can get in sports. And I get to do that every year.” 

Shonna Keogan is assistant dean and chief communications officer at NYU Law.