The NFL lost, and the people won.
A Los Angeles jury sided against the NFL in a class action antitrust trial surrounding NFL Sunday Ticket.
The verdict delivered by the US District Court in the Central District of California orders the NFL to pay $4.7 billion to individual fans and $96 million to bars.
The lawsuit, initially filed in 2015 by Mucky Duck, a bar in San Francisco, accused the NFL of creating a system that violated antitrust laws because of the structure of NFL Sunday Ticket. The lawsuit claimed that the league bundled out-of-market games of all teams into one package, eliminating the option to purchase a package of just one team.
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Many fans and bars around the country are, of course, interested in watching their own team and may not have the same desire to pay up for all teams. The lawsuit said the NFL didn’t give them an option, which drove the price.
Part of the trial revealed that ESPN proposed to the NFL that it could take over the NFL Sunday Ticket offering from DirecTV after last season. The service would be priced at $70, and packages for individual teams would have been offered.
The NFL declined this proposal and went with YouTube TV. The lowest price for an NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV is $349, and that’s with an existing YouTube TV subscription.
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How much will you be able to win from this lawsuit?
The short answer is that individuals and bars win a pretty hefty sum. The 2.4 million fans who purchased Sunday Ticket will take home around $1,958 and the 48,000 business owners will net $2,000 each, though inflation could change that number.
However, don’t expect the NFL to pay for next month’s rent just yet.
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There are still several hurdles to clear before the NFL is forced to pay the plaintiffs, including post-trial motions, on July 31. The biggest potential delay to the payout is that the NFL is planning to appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals of the 9th Circuit, and could even potentially be raised to the Supreme Court.
It’s not shocking that the NFL would delay as long as possible or try to wiggle their way to lower payments. The total payout of $4.8 billion is no small sum, even for the pro sports league with the highest revenue in the world. The payout in this case totals about a quarter of the NFL’s 2023 revenue.
It may take months or years, if at all, for fans and bars affected by this case to receive the couple of thousand dollars from the America’s most popular sports league.
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