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

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

The NFL has said it intends to challenge the decision.

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The lawsuit, first filed in 2015, names 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 broke antitrust laws by selling packages of Sunday games at an inflated price and offering the desired Sunday Ticket games only through a satellite provider.

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

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

The NFL tried to dismiss the case, but was unsuccessful. “The NFL-DirecTV Agreement prevents telecasts from being shown on more than one channel, reducing the number of games shown locally as free over-the-air broadcasts and leaving DirecTV as the only option for viewing many games,” Judge Gutierrez explained in a summary of the plaintiffs’ position in his ruling earlier this year year so that the case could proceed. If the verdict stands, as Deadline wrote at the time, the result could be free streaming, with each of the league’s 32 teams striking individual deals with platform games.

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 national distribution of our most popular games, complemented by a variety of additional options including RedZone, Sunday Tickets and NFL+, is by far the most fan-friendly distribution model across all of sports and entertainment.”

The NFL added that it “will certainly challenge this decision as we believe the class action claims in this matter are baseless and without merit. We thank the jury for their time and service and for Judge Gutierrez’s guidance and supervision throughout the trial.”

The next steps will be to submit post-trial motions, which will be considered by the trial judge on July 31, Deadline hears. If the judgment 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

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