Donald Trump and the New Jersey Generals debacle

Donald Trump has been many things throughout the years: real estate entrepreneur, casino owner, reality TV show star, President of the United States, and Home Alone 2 extra. Believe it or not, for a brief moment in the 1980s, Donald Trump was into sports.

In 1983, Trump seemed to be at the top of the world. The Washington Post writes that the New York mogul had just Trump Tower when he decided he wanted to buy a football team.

At first, Trump showed interest to buy the Baltimore (now Indianapolis) Colts. Ultimately, he settled with The New Jersey Generals, a failing team of the nascent United States Football League, for less than 10 million US dollars.

The New York Times comments that in one year, Trump had turned The New Jersey Generals into the best (and most expensive) team in the USFL. Two years later, the league had ceased to exist and Trump was the main culprit.

The United States Football League was established in 1982. The plan was to have a football league playing in the spring-summer period, during the off-seasons of both college football, and the bigger, better-known National Football League.

The first months of the USFL were promising. The Washington Post writes that they managed to sell broadcasting rights to ABC and to a new sports channel known as ESPN. Then Donald Trump showed up.

CNBC reports that Trump was pretty honest that he saw the USFL as a stepping stone to his dream of owning an NFL team, something that dismayed other team owners.

Still, they hoped that Trump’s wealth and fame would draw crowds into the fledging football league.

According to The Washington Post, Trump managed to get 60,000 spectators for the first home game of the New Jersey Generals. Something that gave him a lot of clout within the USFL.

This was in part by recruiting rising stars from the NFL and college football such as Herschel Walker and Doug Flutie to play for the Generals.

Having the best team in the USFL was not enough, though. Trump wanted to either directly compete with the NFL or force a merger between the two leagues.

“If God wanted football in the spring, he wouldn’t have created baseball,” Trump told ABC News in July 1984, as quoted by The New York Times.

Trump first managed to push the USFL to play its 1986 season during the fall, despite protests from a few team owners. This meant pitching the small, nascent USFL against the well-established NFL. Unsurprisingly, TV ratings and stadium attendance collapsed.

Trump then led the USFL to sue the NFL for over one billion US dollars, on the grounds that the NFL had agreements with the three only TV networks at the time, leaving no space for a competitor.

The ruling was a thing of legend: The jury found that the NFL’s monopoly indeed had harmed the USFL. The entire league was given as compensation the amount of… 3,76 US dollars. The 1986 season would be the USFL’s last, and it was officially dissolved in 1990.

A new league sharing the same name and logo began to play in 2022. It has no connection to the original USFL and, as they have stated numerous times, no connection with Donald Trump.