Bundling the Sunday Ticket

Antitrust and the Future of Sports Distribution

Abstract

This legal analysis concerns the antitrust litigation brought against the National Football League regarding its out-of-market broadcasting package, NFL Sunday Ticket. Plaintiffs alleged the NFL, in collaboration with DirecTV, unlawfully bundled all Sunday afternoon games into a single pack- age, preventing consumers from purchasing individual team games and inflating prices. The class action lawsuit, filed in 2015, covered a subscriber base of over 2.4 million residential customers and approximately 48,000 commercial establishments. In June 2024, a jury awarded over $4.7 billion in damages to the class. However, in August 2024, the trial judge granted judgment as a matter of law in favor of the NFL, ruling that the plaintiffs’ damages experts were inadmissible and no reasonable jury could find class-wide harm without their testimony. This paper outlines the legal framework for assessing the alleged conduct, including the application of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the scope of the Sports Broadcasting Act. It further analyzes the reasoning behind key judicial opinions, eval- uates how the court’s interpretation of evidence influenced the outcome, and considers the broader implications for antitrust enforcement in sports broadcasting.