With a jury finding in late July that the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package as currently constituted violates antitrust law, a major question remains unanswered.
Will the NFL make changes to Sunday Ticket, given the $4.7 billion verdict?
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the NFL anticipates making no changes.
That strategy carries significant risk. The class action covers 2011 through 2022. Already, the league has exposure for 2023, the first season of the shift from DirecTV to YouTube. It will now risk further liability in 2024 and beyond. By the time the appeals process concludes, the league might have three or four (or maybe even five) more years of refunds to eventually make.
The NFL also could guess right. If the league ultimately wins the case via the trial court judge or the two levels of available appeals, the status quo will be validated.
There’s another potential development that could occur. Even if Judge Philip Gutierrez overturns the damages award or orders a new trial on damages, it’s hard to imagine (based on our review of the full trial transcript) that he will scrap the finding of an antitrust violation. One of his biggest complaints during the case was that the basic theory was simple and clear — the NFL banded together to sell the out-of-market games in a way that protected the CBS and Fox audiences for in-market games.
As he said in court on June 18, 2024, “I thought, you know, going into this, you might have had the edge because, again, that’s an easy story to tell: I’m a poor Seattle Seahawks fan in Los Angeles and I’ve got to pay more.”
If Judge Gutierrez upholds the finding of an antitrust violation, he could issue a court order disbanding the current Sunday Ticket structure. That would prompt, presumably, expedited appeals to undo the court order. However, if he opts for what’s known as injunctive relief, there will be a court order requiring the NFL to stop selling Sunday Ticket the way it has sold Sunday Ticket since its inception in 1994.
At trial, the NFL used “chaos” as the primary response to any and all potential alternatives to its longstanding out-of-market product. Chaos will be more than a talking point if Judge Gutierrez issues an order between now and Week 1 telling the NFL to pull the plug on Sunday Ticket, in its current form.