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 league’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. Read the NFL Sunday Ticket ruling here.
The judge added that “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.’”
It was just weeks ago, in late June, that an eight-person 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 such as 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 then 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.
But Gutierrez called out the models used by Daniel Rascher and John Zona. Economic experts typically are key witnesses in antitrust cases, as they model the impact of alleged anti-competitive conduct.
The case already was dismissed once before, by a federal judge in 2017, but the 9th Circuit gave new life to the lawsuit and it eventually proceeded to trial.
In a statement to reporters, the NFL said: “We are grateful for today’s ruling in the Sunday Ticket class action lawsuit. We believe that the NFL’s media distribution model provides our fans with an array of options to follow the game they love, including local broadcasts of every single game on free over-the-air television.”
Dade Hayes and Jill Goldsmith contributed to this report.
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