The NFL’s long fight over Sunday Ticket is not over. A federal appeals court on Friday, Oct. 30, reinstated the 2024 jury verdict that found the league broke antitrust law with the way it sold its out-of-market Sunday package, but it also agreed that the $4.7 billion the jury awarded cannot stand. A new jury will now decide how much the NFL owes the subscribers who sued.
The unanimous ruling came from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Circuit Judges Holly A. Thomas and Anthony D. Johnstone and visiting District Judge Joan H. Lefkow, who heard arguments in San Francisco on March 9. Johnstone wrote the 64-page opinion. The panel reversed the trial judge’s decision to wipe out the verdict, ordered the jury’s liability finding put back in place and sent the case to Los Angeles for a trial on damages only.
How the case got here
The suit was filed in 2015 by a San Francisco sports bar, The Mucky Duck, and other subscribers to DirecTV, which held the exclusive rights to Sunday Ticket through the 2022 season. They argued that the league’s three linked agreements, the teams pooling their TV rights, the deals with the broadcast networks for local Sunday games and the exclusive satellite deal for every out-of-market game, cut the number of games available and pushed up the price of the package. The court noted that Sunday Ticket list prices for households ran from $200 to nearly $400 a season, while bars and restaurants paid from several thousand to more than $100,000.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 lets the league sell its teams’ rights together for free, advertising-supported broadcasts, but the Ninth Circuit had already ruled in 2019 that the exemption does not cover paid cable or satellite packages. The Supreme Court declined to hear the NFL’s appeal of that decision in 2020, and the case went to trial in Los Angeles in June 2024.
After a four-week trial, the jury found the NFL liable on every element of the claims and awarded $4.61 billion to the residential class and $96.9 million to the commercial class. Antitrust damages are tripled by law, which would have put the league’s bill above $14 billion. In August 2024, U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez threw the verdict out, ruling that the subscribers’ two economists had relied on unreliable models, and said that if his ruling were reversed, there should be a new trial on damages. Gutierrez has since retired from the bench.
What the appeals court decided
The panel said Gutierrez went too far when he threw out the economists’ testimony. “Opinions are neither unfounded nor unreliable merely because they are impeachable,” Johnstone wrote. “Such opinions are for the jury to weigh at trial.” The NFL had challenged the same experts before and during the trial and lost each time, the court noted, and its lawyers were free to attack the testimony in front of the jury, which they did.
One expert, Daniel Rascher, compared the NFL with college football, where TV rights opened up after the Supreme Court struck down the NCAA’s control of broadcasts in 1984 and games spread across many channels. The other, Douglas Zona, estimated that a single extra distributor, such as a streaming service, would have cut the price of Sunday Ticket by 49.7%. On that basis he put the overcharge at $2.81 billion for households and $670 million for businesses. A second model, which assumed the league kept the package expensive to protect the ratings of its Sunday broadcast partners, found that the price would have been 24.6% lower. The court said reasonable jurors could argue over whether college football was a fair comparison, “but those questions are for the jury to decide.”
Why the $4.7 billion is gone
The league won the second half of the appeal. The panel agreed with Gutierrez that the jury did not follow its instructions when it set the award. The amounts it gave both classes work out to exactly $191.26 per subscription, which is the 2018 and 2019 household list price of $294 minus Zona’s estimate of the average price households actually paid, $102.74. That gap measures the discounts DirecTV gave customers, not an overcharge, the court said, and it ignored the much higher prices paid by bars and restaurants. “The jury clearly awarded damages based on its improper consideration of the evidence,” Johnstone wrote, adding that this “warrants a new trial on damages.”
In a separate order issued the same day, the panel upheld the certification of the two damages classes, which the NFL had challenged, and revived the subscribers’ claims for a court order against the league’s practices. It asked the trial court to decide whether those claims still make sense now that the DirecTV deal has ended. The court counted more than 24.1 million household subscriptions and about 507,000 business subscriptions sold from June 2011 to February 2023, the period the case covers, and noted that the NFL earned more than $100 billion in those years, most of it from its TV deals.
The NFL responds
The league said it was “disappointed” by a decision in a case that “has been ongoing now for over 11 years” and “now promises to go on even longer.” “We continue to believe that our media distribution strategy, which features 100 percent of NFL games broadcast on free over-the-air television in the markets of the participating teams and national distribution of our most popular games, supplemented by many additional choices including RedZone, Sunday Ticket and NFL Plus, is by far the most fan-friendly distribution model in all of sports and entertainment,” a league spokesperson said. “We appreciate the panel’s attention to this case, and we will be considering our options for seeking further appellate review of today’s decision.”
A league source added that the NFL “would have preferred a full affirmance which would have brought this decades-plus saga to an end, but is gratified that the Ninth Circuit upheld the district court’s decision to throw out the jury’s outsized and unsupported damages award.” The league’s media chief has defended the current TV model before this season, too.
What happens next
The NFL can ask the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case or petition the Supreme Court, and it could still settle with the subscribers. If none of that ends the case, a new jury in Los Angeles will be told that the league is liable and asked only one question: how much it owes. Whatever that jury decides would again be tripled under antitrust law. Nothing changes right away for fans. Sunday Ticket has been sold through YouTube since the 2023 season, and the ruling does not affect the current deal.
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