(Bloomberg) -- A federal judge tossed out a $4.7 billion verdict against the National Football League in a legal fight over pricing of its Sunday Ticket game-broadcast package, after concluding a Los Angeles jury improperly calculated damages.
While evidence could support the jury’s finding of anticompetitive behavior, the conclusion that subscribers should have been paying less to watch games was “clearly not supported by the evidence,” US District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez ruled Thursday. He granted the NFL’s request to dismiss the June damage award, which the league argued was based on inappropriate expert testimony and a “made-up methodology” to calculate damages.
“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, adding that jurors had ignored his instructions on deliberations. He didn’t order a new trial.
The judge’s decision is a significant win for the NFL. After a three-week trial in June, jurors sided with football fans who claimed the league conspired with DirecTV to raise the price of subscriptions to watch out-of-market games. Under federal law, the $4.7 billion in damages stood to be tripled to $14 billion.
In a statement, the NFL welcomed the ruling and said its “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.”
Lawyers for the subscribers didn’t respond Thursday to a request for comment on the ruling.
The central claim in the consolidated lawsuits filed by football fans was that the NFL and its digital service provider, DirecTV, created a monopoly with their Sunday Ticket package that overcharged subscribers to view out-of-market games. Jurors concluded the arrangement was anticompetitive.
Flawed Methodology
But the judge said jurors didn’t use the proper methodology in assessing damages and that the evidence in the case didn’t provide any indication whether Sunday Ticket subscribers would have paid less without the anticompetitive behavior.
To arrive at its damages award, the jury evaluated the list price of NFL Sunday Ticket in 2018 and 2019, according to court documents, even though not all subscribers would have necessarily paid that amount. They then subtracted the average price paid by residential subscribers between 2011 and 2023, the judge said.
By doing this, instead of calculating the “overcharge,” the jurors estimated the discount a residential subscriber received from the listed price, the judge said.
“Awarding discounts as damages is nonsensical,” Gutierrez wrote. “The jury did not follow the Court’s instructions and instead relied on inputs not tied to the record to create its own ‘overcharge.’”
DirecTV, which has denied wrongdoing, wasn’t on trial because it persuaded the judge in 2021 to send customer claims against the company into closed-door arbitration. The NFL has since replaced DirecTV with Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube unit to handle Sunday Ticket broadcasts.
Lawyers for the subscribers had disputed the NFL’s claims that the damage award was flawed. They said the jury was free to use its own calculations and that the verdict was significantly less than the $7 billion subscribers had sought.
The case is In re National Football Leagues Sunday Ticket Antitrust Litigation, 2:15-ml-02668, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles).
(Updates with details from ruling.)
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