ABSTRACT
The previous chapter showed how resolving disputes that arise in the relationship between ‘amateur’ US athletes and their governing body is rooted in the structures available through the OASA, with the courts occasionally providing a necessary bulwark to the wide-ranging powers that the governing bodies hold over them. Within professional sports the existence of very strong players’ unions have long been an integral feature – not in all sports but certainly in the ‘big four’ of basketball, baseball, ice hockey and football, with unions playing a crucial, but less widely acknowledged, role in women’s professional sports too (Edelman and Harrison, 2008). As with the OASA the agreements reached between these unions and the leagues make provision for mandatory recourse to arbitration and other forms of alternative dispute resolution, and the unions have secured dispute resolution structures that are more beneficial to their members than are those operating under the OASA – and far more beneficial than any broadly similar structures operating within the European Union.
