Judge Tosses Out $4.7 Billion Jury Verdict Against NFL In Class Action Lawsuit

deadline.com:

A federal judge tossed out a jury’s $4.7 billion judgment against the NFL over the price of its NFL Sunday Ticket subscriptions, concluding that the experts put forth by the class action plaintiffs were using faulty economic models.

U.S. District Court Judge Philip S. Gutierrez granted the league’s motion for judgment as a matter of law, ruling that, without the reliable expert witnesses, it was “impossible for a jury to determine on a class-wide basis that Sunday Ticket subscribers would have indeed paid less in the absence of Defendants’ anticompetitive conduct.

Read the NFL Sunday Ticket ruling here. The judge added that “plaintiffs failed to provide evidence from which a reasonable jury could make a finding of injury and an award of actual damages that would not be erroneous as a matter of law, be totally unfounded and/or be purely speculative.” Gutierrez also vacated the hefty damages awards, concluding that they “were not based on the ‘evidence and reasonable inferences’ but instead were more akin to ‘guesswork or speculation.'” It was just weeks ago, in late June, that an eight-person jury sided with a class of DirecTV subscribers that the NFL violated antitrust laws by offering Sunday afternoon games via the premium subscription service.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2015, covers 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses such as bars and restaurants who paid for out-of-market games from the 2011 to 2022 NFL seasons on DirecTV.