Trademark Applications for “Las Vegas Athletics” and “Vegas Athletics” Denied
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has given the thumbs down to the trademark application for the names “Las Vegas Athletics” and “Vegas Athletics.”
This is the second refusal of trademark applications for these names.
While we would like to say the trademark applications were refused because the A’s are an unserious organization and their ballpark scam (still $1 billion-plus short of funding) signals there will never be a team called the Las Vegas Athletics, the reason is much more boring. Oh, well. We’ll take our schadenfreude where we can get it.
As we have said frequently, we are not a sports person. We are even less of a trademark law person.
Still, Las Vegas is our beat and pro sports are part of the Las Vegas landscape now, despite our best efforts.
So, there have been filings to trademark the names “Las Vegas Athletics” and “Vegas Athletics.” Being able to legitimately put those terms inside quotation marks gives us such joy.
The trademark applications were rejected, for a second time, because they are “primarily geographically descriptive.”
Meaning you can’t just pick some generic word like “athletics” and slap a place name on it and get it trademarked, especially if you don’t have any real evidence the thing you’re trademarking exists.
Because no team called the “Las Vegas Athletics” or “Vegas Athletics” exists.
No such team has acquired distinctiveness in the marketplace, as required for a trademark. There are no “sales figures, advertising spend, media recognition and consumer perception.” Well, there’s a consumer perception, but that largely involves viewing the A’s ownership and management as a cluster of drooling sycophants who, due to receiving paychecks, seem to have blind faith in the word of someone who has an impeccable history of dumbassery.
The A’s play in Sacramento.
The team (along with its enablers, Major League Baseball and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority) says it’s moving to Las Vegas, but that remains to be seen.
There’s been some construction activity on the Tropicana site, but there are innumerable reasons that’s not evidence a ballpark will be built on the site. Lots of things start in Las Vegas, then end up stalled or abandoned.
You can get into the details of why the trademark applications were turned down on the site of Gerbin IP, an intellectual property strategy and enforcement firm. If you did what these folks do all day, you would never need melatonin again.
Ultimately, this is just a bump in the road for the A’s (and the MLB, who submitted the trademark applications).
They’ll get their trademarks. Trademarks, however, aren’t funding. Nothing has changed, at all, on that front. The team’s owner, John Fisher, says he’s good for it. All the enabling parties say he’s good for it. No investors. No sponsors. No local partnerships. No serious resort partner. No cash on the barrelhead.
Just whimsy, a groundbreaking, high hopes, promises, smoke and mirrors on the former Tropicana site and our local paper of record, the Las Vegas Review-Journal onboard as the A’s public relations company.
Nothing at all has changed since we first wrote about all the things that will never happen on the Tropicana site (with John Fisher as owner of the Las Vegas Athletics). Wouldn’t it be ironic if the MLB included that excerpt from our blog as evidence people associate “Las Vegas Athletics” with a baseball team?
The A’s saga is a trainwreck of Las Vegas proportions, and the debacle unfolding in real time right before our eyes is simply glorious. It’s the Skyvue observation wheel, Dream, Echelon, All Net Arena, Bleutech, the list goes on and on. Let’s throw Kind Heaven or Xanadu in there just to remind you whose Las Vegas this is (as opposed to all the baseball “experts” saying the A’s ballpark is 100% a done deal when it is most certainly not).
Las Vegas will get professional baseball. We just can’t find anyone who wants it to be under these circumstances. We want a casino resort on the Tropicana site, not 80 traffic jams a year on the Las Vegas Strip.
Update (1/6/26): If sports were always thing entertaining, we might give a crap about it.
At least our trademarks are still valid
— Montreal Expos (@Montreal_Expos) January 6, 2026
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