LOS ANGELES—A jury in the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California has ordered the NFL to pay nearly $4.8 billion in damages in an antitrust case alleging that consumers and businesses were forced to overpay for the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package of out-of-market games.
The damages include about $4.7 billion for residential subscribers and nearly $100 million for bars, restaurants and other businesses that subscribed to the package. In Federal antitrust cases damages can be tripled, which would bring the total to over $14.3 billion.
The verdict came after a three-week trial and years of legal wrangling over the package of out-of-market games that was held by DirecTV until it was taken over by YouTube during the last season.
NFL.com reported that the lawsuit involved “covered 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses in the United States who paid for the package of out-of-market games from the 2011 through 2022 seasons on DirecTV.”
The plaintiffs in the case argued that the NFL had abused its market power to artificially restrict competition and raise the cost of the package, which ran about $300.
"We are disappointed with the jury's verdict today in the NFL Sunday Ticket class action lawsuit," the league said in a statement. "We continue to believe that our media distribution strategy, which features all 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+, is by far the most fan friendly distribution model in all of sports and entertainment.”
"We will certainly contest this decision as we believe that the class action claims in this case are baseless and without merit,” the statement added.
