Appeals Court Revives Sunday Ticket Verdict Against The NFL

A federal appeals court on Friday, October 30, brought back the jury verdict that found the NFL broke antitrust law with Sunday Ticket, but it agreed the $4.7 billion award can’t stand and ordered a new trial on damages, the Associated Press reported. The case now heads back to Los Angeles, where a new jury will decide how much the league owes.

The unanimous ruling came from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In a 64-page opinion, Judge Anthony Johnstone wrote that the trial judge “abused its discretion by excluding the subscriber’s expert testimony,” Deadline reported.

How We Got Here

The class action was filed in 2015 and covers about 2.4 million households and 48,000 bars and restaurants that bought Sunday Ticket on DirecTV from 2011 to 2022, per Deadline. The subscribers argued the league, its teams and its TV partners kept the out-of-market package scarce and expensive.

A Los Angeles jury agreed in June 2024 and awarded about $4.7 billion, a number that could have topped $14 billion because federal antitrust damages are tripled, TheWrap noted. Then U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez threw the verdict out, ruling the subscribers’ economists used unreliable models. Gutierrez has since retired from the bench, according to Courthouse News Service.

What The Court Decided

The panel said Gutierrez overstepped. “A district court must be careful not to let its view of the credibility or merits of an expert’s testimony distort its evaluation of whether that testimony is sufficiently reliable to go to a jury,” Johnstone wrote, per Courthouse News. One of those experts compared the NFL to college football, where TV rights opened up after the Supreme Court ended the NCAA’s control of broadcasts. “If that’s not a yardstick, what is?” Johnstone asked at a March hearing.

The NFL won the other half. The panel agreed the jury didn’t follow its instructions when it set the award, calling it a result of “improper consideration of the evidence.” That means liability stands, but the dollar figure starts over. Any new award would again be tripled, ProFootballTalk pointed out.

The league says it isn’t done. “We are disappointed by today’s decision in the NFL Sunday Ticket appeal, the latest development in this case which has been ongoing now for over 11 years – and now promises to go on even longer,” a spokesperson told Deadline. The NFL called its TV setup “by far the most fan-friendly distribution model in all of sports and entertainment” and said it is “considering our options for seeking further appellate review.”

Fan-Friendly For Who?

That “fan-friendly” line is the part that should sting. A jury and now a federal appeals court have landed on the same point: the way the NFL sold out-of-market games broke the law. The league’s answer is to keep fighting over how much it owes, not to argue it didn’t do it.

Meanwhile, the package didn’t get cheaper. It just moved. Sunday Ticket now runs through YouTube TV for about $480 for returning subscribers, Courthouse News reported, and today’s ruling doesn’t touch that deal. A fan in Atlanta who only wants to watch the Steelers still has to buy every out-of-market game to see one team.

The smart money says this ends in a settlement, not a second jury. A league that pulls in billions a year from TV can afford to wait. The bar owner who filed this case in 2015 has already waited 11 years.