NFL settles $4.7 billion lawsuit over Sunday Ticket lawsuit

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A Los Angeles jury agreed Thursday that the NFL violated antitrust laws by offering Sunday afternoon games on a premium subscription service, awarding plaintiffs a hefty $4.7 billion in damages in a years-old class action lawsuit.

The NFL said it intended to contest the decision.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2015, targets 2.4 million individual subscribers and 48,000 businesses, such as bars and restaurants, that paid for out-of-market NFL games during the 2011-2022 NFL seasons on DirecTV. He alleged that the league had broken antitrust laws by selling a package of Sunday games at an inflated price and offering sought-after Sunday Ticket games only on a satellite provider.

In 2023, the NFL signed a seven-year, $14 billion deal with YouTube TV that saw Sunday Ticket move to streaming after a 29-year run on DirecTV, which launched the package.

The plaintiffs in the case argued that the league engaged in price fixing because fans of one team could not buy only that team’s games. (Under the terms of media rights agreements with networks, local stations broadcast games from teams’ home markets on terrestrial television.) Instead, the only option was to sign up for all off-market games with Sunday Ticket, which costs hundreds of dollars per season.

The NFL tried and failed to get the case dismissed. “The NFL-DirecTV agreement prohibits telecasts on more than one channel, which reduces the number of games that are locally broadcast as free over-the-air broadcasts and makes DirecTV the only option for watching many games,” Judge Gutierrez explained in summarizing the plaintiffs’ view in his ruling earlier this year to let the case stand. If the ruling stands, as Deadline wrote at the time, the result could be unlimited streaming, with each of the league’s 32 teams entering individual agreements with gaming platforms.

This verdict is a rare reaction to the NFL, which is a colossus in the television industry and American culture as a whole.

“We are disappointed with today’s jury verdict in the NFL Sunday Ticket class action lawsuit,” the league said in a statement. “We continue to believe that our media distribution strategy, which includes all NFL games broadcast on free over-the-air television in participating team markets and nationwide distribution of our most popular games, complemented by a variety of additional options including RedZone, Sunday Ticket and NFL+, is by far the most fan-friendly distribution model in all of sports and entertainment.”

The NFL added that it “will certainly challenge this decision as we believe the class action lawsuits in this case are meritless and without merit. We thank the jury for their time and service, as well as Judge Gutierrez’s guidance and oversight throughout the process.”

The next steps will be to file post-trial motions, which will be heard by a trial judge on July 31, Deadline hears. If the ruling is not overturned, the judge will likely be asked to consider possible structural changes to the Sunday Ticket package, and will also ask the plaintiffs’ lawyers to award legal costs.

If that happens, the league will likely appeal any adverse rulings to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and any damages or imposition of structural changes to the Sunday Ticket package will be stayed until the appeal is complete.

Dominic Patten contributed to this report