A US judge has sensationally reversed the NFL’s antitrust lawsuit placed against it and had it thrown out due to customer accusations over antitrust violations.
US District Judge Philip Gutierrez of California ruled in favour of the NFL after dismissing jury statements regarding a 27 June case that went in favour of plaintiffs over insufficient evidence surrounding complaints about the NFL’s Sunday Ticket’s prices.
Gutierrez also dismissed two key witnesses – who were subscribers of NFL Sunday Ticket – during Thursday’s (1 August) NFL appeal hearing. He said the jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence and deemed that there were too many defects in the case for it to even proceed.
The NFL released a statement upon the favourable verdict, stating: “We believe that the NFL’s media distribution model provides our fans with an array of options to follow the game they love.”
The appeal hearing that occurred in California last Thursday stems from the league contesting a $4.7bn class action penalty in damages having been found to have overcharged customers of NFL Sunday Ticket telecasts.
NFL Sunday Ticket is the league’s subscription-based model, which was previously on DirecTV and now on YouTube, that enables fans to watch out-of-market games – games that are not nationally televised on the league’s primary broadcasting partners’ channels.
The NFL was deemed to have restricted the availability of NFL Sunday Ticket which then enabled DirecTV to inflate the prices of the service.
The jury and plaintiffs were set to be rewarded $4.6bn to a residential class, and $96m to commercial subscribers such as restaurants, bars, etc.
Upon this ruling last June, the NFL labelled the damages as “nonsensical” based on evidence the jury was allowed to consider, also denying it had any intention to overcharge subscribers.
The league was allowed to appeal this decision and now, fast-forward to last Thursday, and the case has now subsequently been dropped.
The court’s ruling granting judgement as a matter of law to the NFL can be appealed to the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
