Trump Buys the New Jersey Generals USFL Team

Joining the USFL

In early 1984, Donald Trump purchased the New Jersey Generals, a franchise in the United States Football League, a fledgling professional football league that had been formed in 1982 to play a spring schedule that would avoid direct competition with the National Football League. Trump reportedly paid somewhere between $5 million and $9 million for the team, which had already played one season under previous ownership.

Trump immediately raised the Generals’ profile by signing Herschel Walker, one of the most celebrated college football players in the country, and later Doug Flutie, the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback from Boston College. The signings generated headlines and helped legitimize the USFL as a competitor for top football talent.

The Push to Fall

Despite the USFL’s initial strategy of playing in the spring to avoid competing with the NFL, Trump aggressively lobbied fellow owners to move the league’s schedule to the fall, directly challenging the established league. Trump believed that a fall schedule would either force the NFL to merge with the USFL, as the AFL had merged with the NFL in 1970, or at minimum compel the NFL to absorb several USFL franchises, including his Generals.

Many USFL owners, who had built business plans around a spring schedule with lower costs, resisted the move. But Trump’s forceful personality and his argument that the USFL would never be taken seriously as a spring league eventually won out. The league voted to shift to a fall schedule beginning in 1986.

The Antitrust Lawsuit

Central to Trump’s strategy was an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, filed in 1984, alleging that the NFL held an illegal monopoly over professional football, particularly through its television contracts. The USFL argued it could not secure a major television deal because the NFL’s agreements locked up all the major broadcast networks during the fall.

The case went to trial in 1986. While the jury found that the NFL had indeed maintained a monopoly, it awarded the USFL only $1 in damages, tripled to $3 under antitrust law. It was a pyrrhic victory that effectively destroyed the league. The USFL never played another game. The fall schedule that Trump had championed never materialized, and the league folded, taking with it the investments of its other owners and the careers of hundreds of players and staff.

Legacy

The USFL debacle became one of the early case studies in what critics described as the Trump pattern: entering a venture with maximum bravado, pursuing an aggressive and risky strategy over the objections of partners, and emerging from the wreckage with his personal brand enhanced even as others absorbed the losses. ESPN’s 2009 documentary “Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?” placed much of the blame for the league’s demise squarely on Trump’s push for a fall schedule and the doomed antitrust strategy.