A federal judge on Thursday overturned the $4.7 billion jury award in the class action suit for subscribers of the NFL Sunday Ticket programming package.
U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez granted the National Football League’s request to toss out the award. The judge said the jury did not follow his instructions and created an ‘overcharge,’ he wrote in his order.
Gutierrez also said that models presented during the trial about what a media landscape (and subscription fees) would look like without NFL Sunday Ticket were faulty and ‘not the product of sound economic methodology,’ he wrote in the order.
As a result, the damages were more ‘guesswork or speculation’ than figures based on ‘evidence and reasonable inferences,’ Gutierrez wrote.
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What were the jury instructions?
Jurors were instructed to calculate damages based on ‘the difference between the prices Plaintiffs actually paid for Sunday Ticket and the prices Plaintiffs would have paid had there been no agreement to restrict output.”
DirecTV offered Sunday Ticket from 1994 to 2022, with the cost for residential subscribers typically running between $300 and $400. Last year, Google began offering the programming package via YouTube. This year, NFL Sunday Ticket costs $349 to $449.
On June 27, a federal jury in California awarded NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers more than $4.7 billion in damages and nearly $97 million to bars, restaurants, and other businesses with commercial subscriptions to the package.
The plaintiff’s attorneys argued that the NFL, CBS, Fox and DirecTV created a ‘single, monopolized product’ in packaging out-of-market NFL games in the Sunday Ticket package. Because the Sunday Ticket was the only way to get those NFL games, consumers paid inflated prices over the years, the plaintiffs alleged.
The NFL denied any wrongdoing and defended the programming package’s distribution model as a premium product.
“We are grateful for today’s ruling in the Sunday Ticket class action lawsuit,’ the NFL said in a statement sent to USA TODAY. ‘We believe that the NFL’s media distribution model provides our fans with an array of options to follow the game they love, including local broadcasts of every single game on free over-the-air television. We thank Judge Gutierrez for his time and attention to this case and look forward to an exciting 2024 NFL season.”
So what happens now?
The plaintiffs likely could appeal the latest ruling in the case, which began in 2015 when two businesses and two individual subscribers sued on behalf of NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers from 2011.
An estimated 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses bought the NFL Sunday Ticket package from June 17, 2011, to Feb. 7, 2023. In a January 2024 filing, plaintiffs said they were entitled to damages of up to $7.01 billion.
The judge’s order stems from the NFL’s argument in court on Wednesday that the jury’s award should be overturned.
‘There’s no doubt about what they did,’ Gutierrez said Wednesday ahead of his ruling, according to Courthouse News. ‘They didn’t follow the instructions.’
The subscribers’ attorney, Mark Seltzer, told Gutierrez on Wednesday that the jurors should be able to negotiate a fair damages award provided it falls within an evidence-supported range, Courthouse News reported.
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