‘Sunday Ticket’ Verdict Could Cost The NFL More Than $14 Billion

The NFL’s check book took a pretty big hit on Thursday when a U.S. District Court jury ordered the league to pay more than $4.7 billion in damages for violating antitrust laws through its “NFL Sunday Ticket” streaming package.

Per the Associated Press , the $4.7 billion was awarded to the residential class, which covers 2.4 million subscribers, and $96 million in damages was awarded to the commercial class, which accounts for 48,000 businesses, for the period of 2011 through 2022.

And if that sounds like a lot of money (it is), it’s nothing compared to the $14.1 billion the NFL could potentially have to pay out because under federal antitrust laws, damages can be tripled.

The NFL has already stated it’s appealing the decision, but if upheld it’ll be a significant financial blow to a league that reported an annual revenue of approximately $18 billion last year. If the ruling holds up, each team would be on the hook for around $440 million each.

The lawsuit alleges that the NFL sold its “Sunday Ticket” package, which allows subscribers to watch out-of-market games not carried on national broadcast networks, at inflated rates and nullified any competition by distributing only through a satellite provider, which violates antitrust laws.

It was also argued that because the out-of-market games could only be streamed on “Sunday Ticket,” that consumers were forced to pay more — even if they only wanted to watch one team — because the streaming package included every NFL team.

“Given the relatively low cost of internet streaming and satellite and cable television carriage, each team acting independently would offer their games at a competitive price to anybody in the country who wanted to watch that particular team,” the plaintiff’s attorney Bill Carmody said , via CNN. “Instead, however, the teams have all forgone this option in favor of creating a more lucrative monopoly.”

Though Thursday's ruling only pertains to the monetary value the plaintiffs would receive, it appears there could be a shift toward allowing each team to independently offer streaming services for their own games rather than making consumers pay for an entire league’s worth of out-of-market games.