NFL Ordered To Shell Out Over $14 Billion To Customers In ‘Sunday Ticket’ Antitrust Lawsuit

Football fans were equal parts flummoxed and taken aback when NFL Sunday Ticket moved to YouTube TV — away from its typical DirecTV cable provider — and saw the league proceed to skyrocket the cost to buy the all-inclusive package of games. https://twitter.com/MySportsUpdate/status/1645779260488007680 With no other way for out-of-market fans to see their beloved teams play on Sundays, NFL fans have long had no choice but to subscribe or hunt down a local bar that had Sunday Ticket and would actually play their team's game on some TV in the corner. Not exactly an ideal experience. This predictably pissed some people off. To the point where there was an antitrust class-action lawsuit levied against the NFL filed back in 2015. And guess what? The fans won! https://twitter.com/FOS/status/1806424710697074819 https://twitter.com/JoePompliano/status/1806426092707758231 https://twitter.com/SharpFootball/status/1806427957851742425 ...For now. https://twitter.com/MySportsUpdate/status/1806428596770111714 I get that the NFL doesn't want to be on the hook for that much money despite how much of a cash cow/profit machine they are these days. But what better way for polarizing commissioner Roger Goodell and the league office to just take this L on the chin, and empathize with the outrage? The people can't be wrong. The justice system can't be wrong. I'm kidding about those two statements. In this case, though, both are right. All these fancy lawyers can probably find some pedantic semantics by the letter of the law to reverse this decision. I anticipate that'll happen, in fact. That's a shame, too. To come out so strong and say this lawsuit is without merit and baseless just rubs salt in the wound. Complicating matters is the local broadcast dilemma. If you blackout local feeds on Sunday Ticket , a similar issue persists. This little exchange on X sums things up rather well: https://twitter.com/JBFlint/status/1803288691177075037 Part of the argument is that the NFL is forcing YouTube TV to charge such a steep Sunday Ticket premium so that some people are forced to watch the locally-scheduled programming, as Mike Florio explains here: https://twitter.com/PatMcAfeeShow/status/1802740126839120280 Truth is, any of us who really love football could pay any amount of money to get to see our teams play, no matter what that looks like. With how prevalent fantasy football is, a lot of folks care about games that have nothing to do with their IRL team of choice. That's part of the beauty of what Sunday Ticket offers. We just saw the NFL's salary cap double from where it was a decade or so ago. Pro football is the most popular sport in the country and should be accessible to everyone. There shouldn't be this alienating freezing-out of a bunch of people over an exorbitant Sunday Ticket price tag. The principle of the thing feels wrong, no? I think the solution is just to lower the Sunday Ticket price point and develop some sort of alliance with local TV stations so they can carry on as scheduled. Since the NFL is appealing, I suspect we won't have a clear answer on this front for quite a while. https://twitter.com/AndrewBrandt/status/1806432118349664378