NFL Faces New Antitrust Damages Fight in Sunday Ticket Case

A federal appeals court affirmed a jury’s finding that the National Football League violated antitrust law with its Sunday Ticket game-broadcast package and ordered a new trial over how much the league should pay in damages.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded Friday that a judge erred in throwing out a verdict against the NFL following a 2024 jury trial. But the panel said he was correct in tossing the calculation of a $4.7 billion award, and said the consumers who sued the league are entitled to a new trial to calculate financial penalties.

Football fans sued the NFL and DirecTV, a longtime service provider for the league, starting in 2015, alleging they illegally monopolized the market for televised football games with their Sunday Ticket package and overcharged subscribers.

The NFL said it was disappointed by the decision.

“We continue to believe that our media distribution strategy – which features 100% of NFL games broadcast on free over-the-air television in the markets of the participating teams and national distribution of our most popular games, supplemented by many additional choices including RedZone, Sunday Ticket and NFL Plus – is by far the most fan-friendly distribution model in all of sports and entertainment,” the league said.

Either the league or consumers could still ask for a larger panel of 9th Circuit judges or for the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case.

At trial, the league defended its broadcast distribution model as fan-friendly. But despite testimony by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that the subscription fee was solely determined by DirecTV, jurors concluded in June 2024 the arrangement violated the law and awarded $4.7 billion damages, which would have been automatically trebled under antitrust laws. DirecTV, which has denied wrongdoing, wasn’t involved in the trial, having successfully moved customer claims into closed-door arbitration.

In an unusual turn, U.S. District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez in Los Angeles voided the verdict two months later, finding the jury’s conclusion that subscribers should have been paying less to watch games was “clearly not supported by the evidence.”

Lawyers for the subscribers had disputed the NFL’s claims that the damage award was flawed. They said the jury was free to use its own calculations, noting the verdict was significantly less than the $7 billion subscribers had sought.

In their opinion Friday, the appeals court found that Gutierrez was wrong to have excluded some of the expert economic testimony that football subscribers wanted to show provide the jury.

“Reasonable jurors may debate whether college and professional football telecasts are sufficiently similar or how out-of-market NFL games would have become available in the absence of the NFL’s anticompetitive conduct,” the panel wrote. “But those questions are for the jury to decide.”

The case now returns to Judge George H. Wu, who took over the litigation after Gutierrez retired from the bench.

The NFL has since replaced DirecTV with Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube unit to handle Sunday Ticket broadcasts. Congress and the Justice Department have also begun looking into the NFL’s broadcast rights amid complaints that costs for football viewers have skyrocketed as more games move onto streaming services.

The case is In re National Football Leagues Sunday Ticket Antitrust Litigation, 2:15-ml-02668, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles).