A US judge overturns the NFL’s $4.7 billion ruling in the “Sunday Ticket” dispute.

 

A jury decision that ordered the NFL to pay more than $4.7 billion for anti-trust violations related to its “Sunday Ticket” package—which allowed fans to watch games outside of their home areas but forced them to purchase access to a bundle of games in order to do so—was overturned by a California judge.

The league, which is the most watched television network in America, promised to appeal the decision in June.

The NFL expressed its gratitude for the verdict in a statement.

“We think that the NFL’s media distribution model offers our fans a variety of ways to watch the game they love, including free over-the-air television local broadcasts of every single game,” the statement read.

US District Judge Philip Gutierrez raised concerns about the trial’s expert witnesses in a court document on Thursday.

The Court concurs that the testimony of Drs. Rascher and Zona, which were based on their defective methodology, need to be disregarded.

“The Court finds that the jury’s damages awards were more similar to ‘guesswork or speculation’ rather than being based on the “facts and reasonable conclusions,” according to the brief.

The NFL’s package of games outside of a local market that are not shown nationally on other networks was the subject of the lawsuit, which was initially filed in 2015. Plaintiffs’ attorneys in the class action lawsuit claimed that the NFL is charging extra to consumers who only want to watch one team or a small group of teams by limiting broadcasting of such “out-of-market” games to the “Sunday Ticket” package.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys contended in a filing that “each team acting independently would offer their games at a competitive price to anybody in the country who wanted to watch that particular team,” considering the comparatively low cost of internet streaming and satellite and cable television carriage. However, the teams have all chosen to forsake this choice in favor of establishing a more profitable monopoly.

The NFL would have been liable for $14.1 billion in damages if the verdict had been upheld due to the lawsuit’s classification as an anti-trust issue.

U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez of Los Angeles issued the decision, opening a new tab, in response to the NFL’s claims that the jury was “runaway” and that the verdict was not justified.

In a statement, the NFL stated it agreed with the judge’s decision.

Requests for response from the subscribers’ attorneys were not immediately answered.

If NFL fans choose to see their teams play out-of-market games, their only broadcast choice is “Sunday Ticket”. The purported “Sunday Ticket” pricing of subscribers were exaggerated in order to restrict subscriptions and safeguard the distribution rights payments that broadcast networks had to pay to show games in local markets.

Two of the subscribers’ most important witnesses had their evidence excluded by Gutierrez in his 16-page order. He declared that there were too many flaws in the case for it to go any further and that the jury’s damages finding was not supported by the evidence in any other way.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, located in San Francisco, may hear an appeal of the court’s decision awarding the NFL judgment as a matter of law.

In its June 27 ruling, a federal jury in Los Angeles found that the NFL had limited the distribution of “Sunday Ticket,” so enabling DirecTV, the former exclusive distributor, to charge inflated charges. There was no trial for DirecTV.

Based on 24.1 million home subscriptions over the course of the 12-year class period, the jury awarded $4.6 billion, and based on about 506,780 business subscriptions for bars and restaurants, it awarded $96.9 million.

Based on the data the jury was permitted to evaluate, the NFL claimed in a court statement that the damages figure was “nonsensical” and contended that subscribers had been overcharged.

The subscribers retorted that there was no proof the jurors relied on material they were instructed to disregard and that the NFL had based its arguments on “pure conjecture” into the jury’s reasoning.