Nothing gets a football family back together like giving money away.
Via Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, YouTube TV will be offering a $60 discount for Sunday Ticket during the annual Back Together Weekend that the NFL is still trying to make into a thing.
The news of the discount, available July 27 and 28, comes at a time when many are wondering whether the looming $14 billion judgment against the NFL for fixing the price of Sunday Ticket will prompt a change of the pricing structure for 2024 and beyond.
Some (me) have canceled Sunday Ticket after receiving notice of automatic renewal in early August, at $389 for those who pay $72.99 per month for the basic service and $449 for those who don’t. Some (me) are waiting for a better deal — especially since the NFL’s lawyers were pushing at the recent trial that the average price paid from 2011 through 2022 was a little over $100 per year. That’s confusing to many (me), because many (me) paid full freight throughout the period covered by the class action.
It will be interesting to see how many fans dump Sunday Ticket, at least until it’s offered for, say, the $70 that ESPN wanted to charge, or with the single-team option ESPN wanted to provide.
Even if the NFL can lawyer its way out of the $14 billion obligation (and the appeal bod that will be much harder to avoid), the trial exposed some inconvenient truths for the NFL about the fact — not allegation, but fact — that the NFL deliberately charged more than necessary for Sunday Ticket in order to protect the ratings generated by CBS and Fox based on over-the-air viewership in the various American markets.
Some fans love pro football enough to respond to such information by saying, “Thank you sir may I have another.” Some might say, “I’ll still watch football, but I’m not paying for something that should be available to me and everyone else at a much lower price.”
Regardless, a lower price is coming. By $60.
A much lower price could eventually be coming. Especially if the NFL’s effort to overturn the recent verdict fails.