Members of the fan group "Forever Oakland" holding "Keep the Raider Name in Oakland" shortly after the city filed suit against the Oakland Raiders and the NFL in December 2018. (Courtesy photo)

The federal judge overseeing the City of Oakland's antitrust case against the Raiders, the National Football League and its 31 other teams once again sounded skeptical of the city's claims that it suffered an antitrust injury from the team's departure to Las Vegas.

U.S. District Chief Magistrate Joseph Spero of the Northern District of California in a Zoom hearing Friday morning said that if the city's claims were to move forward it was unclear what limitations, if any, the NFL would be allowed to impose on the number of teams in the league and where they play. Spero said in opening remarks that in dismissing the earlier complaint in the case he had asked lawyers for the city at Pearson, Simon & Warshaw and Berg & Androphy to explain what would happen under a lawful, competitive market for NFL franchises. Would Oakland would have fared better? The judge said Friday that Oakland's lawyers still hadn't answered that question.

"There's no indication about what that market would look like and under that market whether Oakland would have gotten a team," Spero said.

The city sued the Raiders, the league and other franchises in late 2018, claiming they conspired to "boycott" Oakland, in violation of federal antitrust laws and in breach of the league's own relocation policies in signing off on the team's move to Las Vegas. The city claimed the $378 million "relocation fee" that the team paid acted as "supra-competitive cartel payments" to the other teams' owners. But in dismissing the initial complaint in the case, Spero held that the relocation fee was actually a disincentive for the team to move.

Pearson Simon's Bruce Simon, arguing for the city Friday, shifted some of his arguments from earlier in the case since the city is now in the position of a city without a team rather than a city seeking to retain a team planning to move. Simon said that NFL had been found in prior cases to be acting as a cartel and that the league's revenue sharing, the requirement that three-fourths of all existing teams must approve any league expansion, and the NFL's monopoly control on its professional football product combined to create a non-competitive market. He noted that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft had made comments to the media that he doesn't expect any further expansion of the league.

But Spero said, "the question is whether the non-expansion is lawful, not whether Kraft thinks there won't be expansion."

Daniel Asimow of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, arguing for the Raiders, said that this was "a political case in search of an antitrust theory."

"What started as a case about a team leaving now, it seems, to be a case about teams not coming," Asimow said. He said that allowing the sort of expansion or team movement that Oakland seemed to be asking for would make running the NFL, or any sports league, unworkable. He added that the plaintiffs could cite no case where a closed-membership joint venture had been forced to accept new members. He also said that the city, since it has not formally applied for an expansion team, didn't have standing to challenge the league's rules regarding expansion. He said the league has modest fees for anyone seeking to start an expansion team. "Let somebody try and see what happens and that entity has a whole lot fewer standing issues," Asimow said.