Arena League Season Canceled

Pro football may not be returning to Los Angeles after all.

In the latest round of an ongoing labor dispute that threatens the future of the Arena Football League, the league’s owners voted Thursday to cancel the 2000 season.

The Avengers, scheduled to play their home games in Staples Center, are one of three expansion teams that were expected to launch their inaugural seasons in April.

But the owners of the league’s 18 teams, responding to an antitrust suit filed against the league this month by Arena League players, voted to scrap the season after meeting for two days in Chicago.

“It’s pretty devastating,” Ron Kurpiers, the league’s deputy commissioner and general counsel said from Chicago. “Hundreds of people lost their jobs as a result of this.”

The situation has been brewing since Feb. 3, when the players filed suit in U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., seeking free agency and an end to “price-fixed salaries” and contracts without injury benefits.

The owners, vowing to cancel the season if the suit remained in litigation, want the players to form a collective-bargaining unit to begin negotiating the league’s first players’ agreement.

In a statement Thursday, the league’s Board of Directors accused the United Food and Commercial Workers Union of interfering with the Teamsters’ efforts to organize the players--against the players’ wishes.

“We understand that a majority of Arena Football League players have requested that Local 781 of the Teamsters in Chicago act as the exclusive bargaining representative of all Arena Football League players,” read the statement.

But Jeffrey Kessler, the attorney for the players who filed suit, had said earlier that the majority of players are not in favor of a union because it would immunize the owners against antitrust allegations.

The average Arena League salary is $30,000.

The league conducts no draft, and all players are free agents until they sign with a team. A signing team retains a player’s rights until he is traded, waived, released or signed by an NFL team.