League’s bill could treble to US$14bn and there are possible consequences for US media rights deals.

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The National Football League (NFL) has been ordered to pay US$4.7 billion in damages to subscribers of Sunday Ticket after it was found to have broken antitrust laws by inflating the price of the package of out-of-market matchups.

Sunday Ticket, first launched in 1994, offers NFL games available for local broadcast on CBS and Fox to national audiences. It was carried by DirecTV’s satellite platform until 2023 and is now a streaming proposition on Google’s YouTube TV, with the multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) service, paying a reported US$2 billion a year for the privilege.

A class action lawsuit on behalf of 2.4 million residential customers and 48,000 commercial subscribers to Sunday Ticket between 2011 and 2022 argued that the NFL conspired to keep prices high and limit availability by making it exclusive to satellite platforms.

This, the plaintiffs claimed, was designed to limit the number of subscribers in order to protect its broadcast contracts with CBS and Fox. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who testified earlier this month, said Sunday Ticket was a premium product and that the reason it opted for satellite distribution was because it could offer true national distribution when compared to a more fragmented cable landscape.

Meanwhile, the NFL was also adamant that it had the right to sell Sunday Ticket under its antitrust exemption. The lawsuit disputed this, arguing that the exemption applies solely to over-the-air broadcasts and not pay-TV platforms.

The league is likely to appeal the verdict. However, US law allows for damages in antitrust cases to be trebled, meaning the NFL’s bill could amount to more than US$14 billion if it isn’t successful.

SportsPro says…

Even for a sporting behemoth like the NFL with domestic media deals worth more than US$120 billion, US$4.7 billion is hardly a drop in the ocean. Nearly US$15 billion would represent a significant fraction of that revenue stream and would exceed the value of its Sunday Ticket partnership with Google.

However, more pertinently, there could also be a long-term impact on how sports rights are sold in the US, particularly when it comes to centralised out-of-market broadcast arrangements. If individual teams have the ability to sell their own rights, then franchises with national fanbases would be able to secure more lucrative deals, potentially to the detriment of competition – and long-term earnings potential.

The NFL and others could also be forced to offer more flexible options, such as team-only packages, that could have a similar effect if individual franchises decide they should be entitled to a greater share of revenues because they are more popular.

The impact could be felt beyond the NFL. Indeed, for leagues with prominent out-of-market propositions like Major League Baseball (MLB), this could exacerbate already significant disparities in earnings and wage bills.