As a kid, I would read the sports section every morning while munching on a bowl of Frosted Flakes before they got soggy, and sometimes I’d skim through the rest of the paper.
And then I quit.
It was always going to happen, something that had been happening for a while, and the latest news on the subject assumed you had a basic level of understanding of the situation. If you didn’t, you were hopeless.
As you return to football after a summer spent doing other things, you may have seen the coverage about the Sunday Ticket lawsuit. You may not know what it’s all about, so we’d like to give you an overview of the lawsuit, what has happened so far, what’s next, and how you can find out more about it.
The lawsuit dates back to 2015. It combines a class action lawsuit brought by commercial establishments with a class action lawsuit representing more than 2.4 million residential customers of Sunday Ticket. The combined class action covers the years 2011 through 2022.
Those who purchased Sunday tickets during that period Check out this websiteYou might want to bookmark it.
The argument is quite simple: Since 1961, the NFL has received an antitrust exemption from Congress that gave the league the power to sell television rights to free over-the-air networks. As former Commissioner Pete Rozelle emphasized in his testimony before Congress, this exemption was never intended to apply to “pay” television.
When the NFL first sold television rights to cable networks in the late 1980s (a half-season on Sunday nights on ESPN), no one asserted antitrust concerns, and when the NFL sold its out-of-market package to DirecTV in 1994, potential antitrust violations were in plain sight.
As alleged and proven in the lawsuit, the damage was that the NFL set the prices of the Sunday Ticket to redirect millions of viewers who would have purchased Sunday Ticket tickets to games available on local CBS and Fox affiliates, thereby creating a golden opportunity for the NFL to collect billions of dollars from DirecTV (thanks to fans who were willing to pay the inflated prices) and billions more from CBS and Fox (who were reluctant to accept the ratings losses caused by the Sunday Ticket).
After nine years of litigation, the trial began in June after an appeals court reopened the case after an initial district court judge dismissed it. Even before the trial began, the worst-case scenario for the NFL was hinted at. $21 billionCoverage was sparse and lackluster. Niche media ran sporadic stories. The Associated Press ran occasional, sketchy but incomplete coverage. There was no one stationed in the courtroom watching the proceedings and reporting on day-to-day developments.
We tried to sound the alarm that something big might be happening. Few people listened, and those who did tended to ignore the concerns, probably because there were so few people who said, “Hey, the NFL might lose a lot of money here.”
The judgment was entered: $4.7 billion. If that judgment becomes law, it will automatically triple to $14.1 billion.
The NFL will continue to fight because there is so much money at stake, and based on what the judge said in court, the NFL may be able to get the ruling overturned, and if the ruling becomes official, the NFL will likely appeal it to the fullest extent possible.
Coverage of the trial was so sloppy that we purchased the entire 2,506-page transcript earlier this month, and I’m working my way through it one day at a time.
If you are interested in the coverage someone should have produced during this trial, here are links to the first eight days of the trial.
Day 1 (Judges’ Selection).
Day 2 (Opening Statements).
Days 2-3 (Testimony of former NFL media chief Steve Bornstein).
Day 3 (Testimony of Plaintiff Robert Lippincott, a Saints fan who was evacuated).
Day 4 (Testimony of Fox executive Larry Jones).
Days 5-6 (Dr. Daniel Lasher’s testimony regarding damages).
Day 6 (Judge vents frustration at plaintiff’s lawyer).
Day 6 (Testimony from current NFL media chief Brian Rolapp).
Day 7 (Expert testimony on damages).
Day 8 (Roger Goodell’s testimony).
There are still nearly 1,000 pages of transcripts to go, and more to come.
There’s more action in court, where a judge is scheduled to hear arguments on the NFL’s motion for a legal ruling on Wednesday.
There will ultimately be an appeal, possibly all the way to the US Supreme Court, given the $14.1 billion at stake, which could take several more years to resolve.
In the meantime, the question is whether the NFL will change its Sunday Ticket pricing structure to avoid further liability — or even eliminate Sunday Ticket altogether.
And whether, and to what extent, the owners will try to push some of that $14.1 billion onto others, starting with the players.
We will continue to cover the case and summarise the record and publish it on a dedicated page. The full story of Sunday TicketThose who bought Sunday Tickets from 2011 through 2022 may finally be receiving checks of more than a small amount, and for those who still want to buy tickets, it could become a lot easier and cheaper to get them.
Win or lose, this is an inescapable truth: the NFL exploited its most dedicated fans, making them pay far more than they should have to to watch out-of-market games. “Choice” cost enough that most migrant fans could watch games available in their local market, and the NFL got a double rep on the billions of dollars in revenue provided by DirectTV and CBS/Fox.
