By Christopher R. Deubert, Senior Writer
On March 28, 2025, an Oregon jury awarded former Portland Timbers goalkeeper Jake Gleeson $20.4 million in damages against Dr. Richard Edelson, a Timbers doctor. Gleeson had alleged that Edelson was negligent in performing surgery on Gleeson’s legs in 2018, resulting in painful infections which required 14 additional surgeries and ended his career. The verdict highlights the complicated relationship among teams, team doctors, and players, including concerns over divided loyalties, sponsorship arrangements, and potentially costly liability.
The Structural Conflict of Interest
Doctors for professional sports teams have a variety of duties, including specifically: (1) providing healthcare to players; (2) helping players determine when they are ready to return to play; (3) helping clubs determine when players are ready to return to play; (4) examining players the club is considering employing (e.g., potential draft picks or free agents); and (5) helping clubs make decisions about a player’s future with the club, including the possibility of a contract extension or release.
These duties do not necessarily align. Trust is an important element of the doctor-patient relationship. But trust can be diminished if the doctor is able to relay the patient’s medical situation to the patient’s employer for purposes of evaluating the patient’s employment. Yet, players generally execute broad waivers permitting the disclosure of their health information by team doctors to team officials or such disclosure is explicitly permitted by the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the league and players union.
The leagues and unions recognize these conflicts and consequently seek to contract around them. For example, the CBA between the NFL and NFLPA declares that “Club medical personnel’s primary duty in providing player medical care shall be not to the Club but instead to the player-patient.” Implicit in this obligation is the recognition that team doctors have duties beyond their “primary” one, i.e., duties to the teams which may be in conflict with the players’ interests. The CBAs governing the NHL, MLS, WNBA, and NWSL all contain the same “primary duty” language. The MLB and NBA CBAs are silent on the issue.
Recognizing the existence of these conflicts does not diminish the fact that team doctors for professional sports teams are generally among the leading experts in their fields. Nevertheless, there is a conflict of interest inherent in the structure through which doctors provide healthcare to players in these leagues. For these reasons, in a 2016 report I co-authored with Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law School and Holly Fernandez Lynch, then of Harvard and now at the University of Pennsylvania, we recommended a division of responsibilities between two distinct groups of medical professionals. Player care and treatment should be provided by one set of medical professionals (i.e., the Players’ Medical Staff), appointed by a joint committee with representation from both the league and union, and evaluation of players for business purposes should be done by separate medical personnel (i.e., the Club Evaluation Doctor).[1]
Pay for Play
The structural conflict of interest and trust concerns between team doctors and players can be exacerbated by the manner in which team doctors are selected. Nearly every team in the major American sports leagues has a sponsorship arrangement with one or more healthcare organizations. Those agreements typically include (or are executed alongside agreements which include) the right for the healthcare organization to be the practice of choice for the players’ healthcare needs as well as the right for the healthcare organization to select the team doctors for the club.
The leagues take different approaches on this issue. The NFL and MLB have policies which explicitly prohibit healthcare providers from paying for the right to provide healthcare. The NBA and WNBA at least have language in their CBAs requiring that selection of the team’s healthcare providers shall not be “based primarily on a sponsorship relationship.” Other leagues are more permissive.
In MLS, it is common for the club’s team doctor to work for a healthcare provider that is a sponsor of the club and for that sponsorship arrangement (i.e., payments from the healthcare provider to the club) to be contingent on the team using the healthcare provider for player medical care (Disclosure: from November 2018 to March 2021, I was General Counsel of D.C. United of MLS). Indeed, in the Gleeson case, Dr. Edelson is a part of Sports Medicine Oregon, which advertises itself as the “Official Team Doctors of the Portland Timbers.”
Again, it is important to acknowledge that team doctors are highly qualified. Indeed, doctors with a history of working with teams sometimes switch their organizational affiliations whenever the club changes sponsors to ensure continuity. Nevertheless, the existence of sponsorship arrangements can contribute to a lack of trust between the players and their healthcare providers.
High Value Plaintiffs
The damages awarded to a plaintiff in a lawsuit must be rationally connected to the harm actually suffered by that plaintiff. In cases where a plaintiff’s earning capacity has been harmed (such as in a wrongful termination case), the damages are going to be higher when the plaintiff had a high salary.
This simple legal concept is thus particularly important where a highly paid athlete is the plaintiff. For example, in February 2023, former Philadelphia Eagles player Chris Maragos was awarded $43.5 million in a medical malpractice case against the Eagles’ team doctors, a verdict upheld on appeal. A jury agreed that the doctors’ failure to properly treat Maragos’ knee injury prematurely ended his career, depriving him of significant future career earnings.
In the Gleeson case, while MLS players earn substantially less than NFL players, most are still paid a few hundred thousand dollars per year. For that reason, the jury awarded him $2.145 million in lost earning capacity (the bulk of the award was for non-economic damages, e.g., pain and suffering).
Ultimately, the risk associated with treating professional athletes is reflected in higher insurance premiums for the doctors and their organizations. When coupled with sponsorship fees (as permitted in some leagues), the cost to be a team doctor is not insignificant.
Deubert is Senior Counsel at Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete LLP
[1] Christopher R. Deubert, I. Glenn Cohen, and Holly Fernandez Lynch, Protecting and Promoting the Health of NFL Players: Legal and Ethical Analysis and Recommendations (2016), also available at 7 Harv. J. Sports & Ent. L. 1
