Jury Sentences NFL for $4.7 Billion in ‘Sunday Ticket’ Legal Battle

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

The NFL has said it intends to challenge the decision.

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The lawsuit, first filed in 2015, covers 2.4 million individual subscribers and 48,000 businesses, such as bars and restaurants, that paid for out-of-market games during the 2011-2022 NFL seasons on DirecTV. It claims the league violated antitrust laws by selling packages of Sunday games at inflated prices and offering coveted Sunday Ticket games only through a satellite provider.

In 2023, the NFL entered into a seven-year, $14 billion deal with YouTube TV that would bring Sunday Ticket to streaming after 29 years on DirecTV, which launched the package.

The plaintiffs in that case argued that the league engaged in price-fixing because fans of one team could not buy tickets to only that team’s games. (Under the terms of media rights agreements with the networks, local stations broadcast games in the teams’ home markets on over-the-air television.) Instead, the league’s only option was to sign up for all out-of-market games through Sunday Ticket, which cost 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 is upheld, 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.

The 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 claims in this case are without merit and without merit. We thank the jury for its time and service and for Judge Gutierrez’s guidance and supervision throughout the process.”

The next step will be to file post-trial motions, which will be heard by a judge on July 31, Deadline hears. If the verdict is not overturned, the judge will likely be asked to consider possible structural changes to the Sunday Ticket package, as well as a request from plaintiffs’ lawyers to award them legal fees.

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

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