The $4.7 billion NFL Sunday Ticket verdict was struck down by a federal judge Thursday night, a drastic move that takes the NFL off the hook for enormous damages.
U.S. District Court Judge Philip Gutierrez penned a 16-page ruling on why he made the extraordinary decision to set aside the verdict rendered after a three-week trial concluded June 27. In the order that granted the NFL’s motion to set aside the verdict, Gutierrez wrote the “jury’s damages verdict is clearly not supported by the evidence and must be vacated.”
Gutierrez voiced skepticism on how the jury came up with the $4.7 billion figure, one that wasn’t presented to the eight-member jury during the three-week trial at a hearing Wednesday. Still, courtroom observers expected Gutierrez would take days or weeks to issue his decision, and it was expected he’d order a new trial if the concerns were insurmountable.
Instead, the case verdict is out and no new trial was ordered.
“The Court finds that the jury’s damages awards were not based on the ‘evidence and reasonable inferences’ but instead were more akin to ‘guesswork or speculation.’” Gutierrez wrote.
The NFL argued at the hearing that the jury used discounts—not the price consumers and business owners paid for Sunday Ticket—to come up with the award amount. Gutierrez agreed.
“The jury relied on the residential list price for two years in the class period,” Gutierrez wrote. “There was no evidence that supported the jury’s determination this represented the price paid for Sunday Ticket for the whole class period.”
Under antitrust law, the jury award could have been trebled to around $14 billion—more than the NFL takes in annually in U.S. broadcast and streaming revenue.
“We are grateful for today’s ruling in the Sunday Ticket class action lawsuit,” the NFL said in a statement. “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.”
The litigation had two different classes that included 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 business customers who subscribed to Sunday Ticket through DirecTV from the 2011 through 2022 seasons.
