The League is expected to pay $4.7 billion

The beginning of the NFL Super Bowl in 2024.

Steph Chambers/Getty Images

The National Football League was hit with a verdict of about $4.7 billion after a jury found its broadcast model violated antitrust laws.

A Los Angeles jury on Thursday agreed with fans who said they overpaid for NFL Sunday tickets, a decision that came after less than a day of deliberations that could force the league to change its broadcast model, making it the most popular sports league in the country.

The eight-year legal battle centered on allegations that the league and its 32 teams conspired in violation of antitrust laws to allow the NFL to strike exclusive deals with television partners for the right to broadcast out-of-market games.

In a statement, an NFL spokesman said the ruling would be appealed. “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 national distribution of our most popular games, complemented by many additional options including RedZone, Sunday Tickets and NFL+ is by far the most fan-friendly model distribution across all sports and entertainment,” the statement continued.

The antitrust ruling could triple the damages, meaning the NFL could pay nearly $15 billion. The league is expected to decide whether to overturn the ruling. If the judge upholds the ruling, it will consider structural changes to Sunday Ticket. Appeals will then begin to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

NFL fans filed a class action lawsuit in 2015. They highlighted a key difference in the NFL’s approach to broadcasting compared to the other four professional sports leagues: viewers who want to watch games that aren’t broadcast locally must subscribe to the Sunday Ticket premium offering. This means that Kansas City Chiefs fans living in Los Angeles have to pay hundreds of dollars a year at allegedly inflated prices to watch their favorite team play. There is no offer that would allow them to do this Just watch Chiefs games.

The NFL defense was multi-pronged. During opening remarks, Beth Wilkinson, an attorney for the NFL, highlighted the league’s immense popularity, arguing that viewers are more than happy with its offerings, which she said include NFL RedZone and NFL+.

“The NFL strives to bring as much football as possible to as many fans as possible. Why?” he asked Wilkinson. “Because it builds a large fan base. That’s why Americans’ favorite sport is football. They want to offer it to as many people as possible at the lowest possible cost.”

The league also pointed to other so-called pro-competitive effects to justify bundling its teams’ broadcast rights, including the ability for CBS and Fox to broadcast local games for free. Other leagues, the NFL argued, do not do so to the detriment of their fans.

Under the league’s agreement with CBS and Fox, there is one telecast for each Sunday afternoon NFL game, and the networks in turn are given the exclusive right to broadcast a limited number of games via free over-the-air television in local markets. No more than two games can be broadcast at the same time in a given local market. This effectively gives the networks exclusive rights to certain games.

Consumers argued that the NFL engaged in price fixing with DirecTV. In a 2012 email, Robert Stecklow, former DirecTV sports strategy director, wrote to an NFL executive, “Let’s make a decision locally” and that the league “100% (agreed) every year at a meeting like yesterday.” Amanda Bonn, a consumer attorney, said the correspondence shows that the NFL received advance notice of DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket prices every year. “This is price fixing,” she said during opening statements. “This is illegal.”

In another message from Alex Kaplan, DirecTV’s chief revenue and product management officer, to an AT&T executive when the two companies were considering a merger that threatened the league’s ability to control pricing, the executive wrote, “I wanted to lower the price” of Sunday Ticket, but the NFL denied the request because the league “considered their product a premium offering” and that “lowering the price would send a signal that their product needed help.”

DirectTV was not a defendant in the lawsuit, and a judge in 2021 sent claims against the company to arbitration.

Consumer lawyers sought nearly $7 billion in damages. The NFL has denied any wrongdoing.