Judge Tosses Out $4.7 Billion Jury Verdict Against NFL In Class Action Lawsuit

A federal judge tossed out a jury’s $4.7 billion judgment against the NFL over the price of its NFL Sunday Ticket subscriptions, concluding that the experts put forth by the class action plaintiffs were using faulty economic models.

U.S. District Court Judge Philip S. Gutierrez granted the NFL’s motion for judgment as a matter of law, ruling that, without the reliable expert witnesses, it was “impossible for a jury to determine on a class-wide basis that Sunday Ticket subscribers would have indeed paid less in the absence of Defendants’ anticompetitive conduct. Thus, Plaintiffs failed to provide evidence from which a reasonable jury could make a finding of injury and an award of actual damages that would not be erroneous as a matter of law, be totally unfounded and/or be purely speculative.”

Gutierrez also vacated the hefty damages awards, concluding that they “were not based on the ‘evidence and reasonable inferences’ but instead were more akin to ‘guesswork or speculation.'”

Read the NFL Sunday Ticket ruling.

It was just weeks ago, in late June, that a jury sided with a class of DirecTV subscribers that the NFL violated antitrust laws by offering Sunday afternoon games via the premium subscription service.

The lawsuit first filed in 2015 covers 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses like bars and restaurants who paid for out-of-market games from the 2011 to 2022 NFL seasons on DirecTV. It alleged that the league broke antitrust laws by selling the Sunday game package at an inflated price, and by offering the sought after Sunday Ticket games only on a satellite provider.

In 2023, the NFL kicked off a seven-year, $14 billion deal with YouTube TV, which moved Sunday Ticket to streaming after a 29-year run on DirecTV, which had launched the package.

Plaintiffs in the case argued that the league was engaging in price-fixing because fans of a single team were not able to buy just that team’s games. (Under the terms of media rights deals with networks, local stations carry games in teams’ home markets on over-the-air broadcast television.) Instead, the only option was to sign up for all out-of-market games on Sunday Ticket, which costs hundreds of dollars a season.