Football fans across the country should welcome Oakland’s lawsuit challenging the monopolistic practices of the NFL and its 32 teams.

It won’t keep the Raiders in the East Bay, but frankly they’ve outstayed their welcome. However, if the city prevails, other cities would have stronger negotiating power to hold onto their teams.

And Oakland might recover money to help pay off about $80 million of debt the Raiders are leaving behind for taxpayers. The money was used for publicly funded alterations to the Coliseum that the Raiders demanded in 1995 as a condition of returning from Los Angeles.

Even though the team is leaving again, Oakland is on the hook for retiring the bonds that paid for those changes – which added high-priced seating for football games but made the venue less attractive for baseball fans.

This is a legal case worth pursuing, especially when private attorneys are taking it on a contingency-fee basis, confident enough that they will prevail to assume the financial risk of the litigation. It’s helpful that the NFL does not enjoy the same antitrust exemptions that were granted to Major League Baseball.

The Raiders are preparing to move to Las Vegas, where a new stadium for them is under construction. The city of Oakland contends that it never had a fair chance to bid to keep the team, which in retrospect seems accurate.

Oakland notes in its legal case that its proposal was essentially the same as the deal offered by Las Vegas, with one key exception. Baked into the terms offered by Las Vegas was $378 million of “relocation fees” to split between the other 31 teams.

In the NFL, when a team wants to move, it must pay the other teams for the right to do so. It is what Oakland calls a “cartel payment” that goes straight to the NFL club owners’ bottom line.

That’s what drives the decision. “It was immaterial to the (NFL owners) that the Raiders were financially successful in Oakland, received significant support from Oakland and had one of the most loyal fan bases in the NFL, the Raider Nation,” the city alleges.

“Maximizing their cartel fee – ultimately at the expense of the consuming public and taxpayers – is what really matters to (them).”

Those are serious claims. The NFL owners have restricted the number of teams to fewer than the number of cities that want them. That frequently allows the teams to extract publicly funded concessions from cities under the threat of leaving if they don’t capitulate.

Whether it’s a new city trying to lure the team, or the host city trying to keep it, either the relocation fees or improvements demanded by the NFL must be paid.

“This is a case of leveraging of monopoly power, resulting in an anti-competitive wealth transfer from municipalities to private business, in violation of the antitrust laws.”

And therein lies the biggest question, whether the city can prove that antitrust laws have been broken. It it can, it’s a whole new ballgame.