As more and more money has flooded into the esports industry, player rights have been a hot topic across multiple games. Careers in esports can be extremely short, making it all the more important to ensure that players receive their fair share of the profits their work generates. With that in mind, Riot Games, producer of League of Legends and proprietor of the wildly popular League Championship Series, recently announced a plan to create and fund a player’s association, a group that will perform many of the functions associated with a union and will be the first of its kind in esports.

According to Riot’s description of the plan, the company will be “providing pros the resources to set up a Players’ Association.” The players will vote on representatives who will take part in league decisionmaking. (Riot says players will be choosing from “a short list of representatives” that will be presented to the players in June, and the players will have the option of rejecting any and all candidates provided and electing whoever they like.) Once formed, the association will provide legal help, career-planning advice, and represent the players in what Riot calls “tri-party” negotiations between Riot, team owners, and the players themselves.

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I asked William Gould IV of Stanford, an expert in entertainment and sports law, if he thought Riot’s explanation passed muster. “The National Labor Relations Act doesn’t apply simply to so-called unions. It applies to any labor organization,” Gould told me over the phone on Monday. “Therefore, it appears that this ‘association’ is a labor organization and would be covered by the statute.

“The underlying point here is that the organization, the group, is a labor organization within the meaning of the act, and it’s unlawful to provide assistance—financial assistance or support for it. The fact that players are employed by the teams, well, that’s generally true, but that’s not dispositive of these two basic questions. Any association that involves relationships with an employer over working conditions as well as other aspects of employment is a labor organization within the meaning of the law. A company giving financial support or other forms of support of such organizations is a violation of the law. I think that the problem here is that this party would be, at a minimum, viewed to be an agent of the respective teams.”