A federal appeals court on Friday, October 30, reinstated the 2024 jury verdict finding that the NFL violated antitrust law with its Sunday Ticket package, but it upheld a new trial on how much the league owes, so the roughly $4.7 billion award is not coming back.
The published opinion in In re National Football League's "Sunday Ticket" Antitrust Litigation was written by Judge Anthony D. Johnstone for a panel that included Judge Holly A. Thomas and U.S. District Judge Joan H. Lefkow of Illinois, sitting by designation. The court heard argument on March 9. Its bottom line reads "REVERSED IN PART, AFFIRMED IN PART, AND REMANDED." The league was disappointed with the decision and is weighing its options, La Voce di New York reported.
How the case got here
The class action began in 2015 on behalf of DirecTV subscribers, both households and businesses such as bars, who paid for Sunday Ticket, the package of out of market Sunday games. They argued that the NFL's pooled rights deals with CBS, Fox and DirecTV kept prices artificially high. The federal Sports Broadcasting Act lets leagues sell free, ad supported broadcasts as a group, but the Ninth Circuit held in 2019 that the law does not shield pay television deals from antitrust scrutiny.
A Los Angeles jury found the NFL liable on every element in June 2024. On August 1, 2024, Judge Philip S. Gutierrez threw out the verdict, Hoodline reported. He ruled that the testimony of the subscribers' two economists, Daniel Rascher and Douglas Zona, was unreliable and inadmissible, and without it the case collapsed. In the alternative, he ordered a new trial on damages.
What the opinion actually says
The panel split the judge's ruling in two. On the experts, it said he went too far. Opinions "are neither unfounded nor unreliable merely because they are impeachable," Johnstone wrote, and by "inquiring beyond the reliability of the experts' methods and the sufficiency of their data," the trial court "exceeded its gatekeeping role" under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. Whether college football is a fair yardstick for an NFL market without the challenged deals, the court said, is a question "for the jury to decide."
On damages, the panel sided with the judge. The jury was told to award the overcharge, meaning the gap between what subscribers paid and what they would have paid without the anticompetitive conduct. The court concluded the jury did something else.
Our check of the jury's math
The jury awarded exactly $4,610,331,671.74 to the residential class and $96,928,272.90 to the commercial class. The opinion explains the likely source. Subtract Zona's disputed estimate of the average price residential subscribers actually paid, $102.74, from the 2018 and 2019 residential list price of $294, and you get $191.26. Multiply that by the opinion's counts of 24,105,049 residential subscribers and 506,788 commercial subscribers.
We ran the numbers. The residential product is $4,610,331,671.74, an exact match to the cent. The commercial product is $96,928,272.88, two cents off the verdict, almost certainly rounding. The two awards total $4,707,259,944.64.
That is the problem the panel identified. The $191.26 figure is the discount residential buyers got below list price, "a discount, not an overcharge," and it ignores that commercial customers paid, on average, "an order of magnitude higher" than households. For comparison, Zona's own exclusivity model put the overcharge at $2.81 billion for households and $670 million for businesses, about $3.48 billion together, or roughly 26 percent below what the jury awarded.
What is at stake in the retrial
Antitrust damages are tripled by statute. Under 15 U.S.C. 15, a successful plaintiff "shall recover threefold the damages by him sustained." Applied to the 2024 award, that would have been about $14.12 billion by our math. Applied to Zona's $3.48 billion model, it would be about $10.44 billion. The new jury will start with liability already decided and argue only about the number.
The NFL can still seek rehearing by the full Ninth Circuit or ask the Supreme Court to step in. Other athletes and fans are also testing sports leagues in court this fall, including in NCAA Asks Kentucky Appeals Court to Halt Order Letting Class of 2022 Athletes Play. For another big civil jury case under way in Los Angeles, see Meta and Snap Face a Los Angeles Jury in the Next Social Media Addiction Trial.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
