The NFL Sunday Ticket lawsuit is a class action accusing the National Football League and its 32 teams of illegally inflating the price of out-of-market game packages by pooling their broadcast rights and selling them through a single distributor. A federal jury in Los Angeles sided with subscribers in June 2024 and awarded roughly $4.7 billion in damages, but the trial judge threw out the verdict about five weeks later. The case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which heard oral arguments in March 2026 and is expected to rule sometime in 2026.
What the Lawsuit Claims
The case, In re National Football League’s “Sunday Ticket” Antitrust Litigation, was filed in 2015 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The certified class covers more than 2.4 million residential subscribers and roughly 48,000 commercial subscribers who bought Sunday Ticket on DirecTV between June 2011 and February 2023.
Subscribers sued under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Their theory: rather than letting each team sell its own out-of-market broadcast rights and compete for viewers, the NFL bundled all 32 teams’ Sunday afternoon games into one expensive package sold exclusively through DirecTV. A fan who wanted to follow a single out-of-market team had to buy access to every game at a price plaintiffs said would not survive in a competitive market.
The NFL argued that pooling rights is what makes the league work. Without centralized deals, the league said, smaller-market teams would struggle to find broadcast partners and fewer games would reach air. It also described Sunday Ticket as a “premium product” that sits alongside the free Sunday broadcasts on CBS and Fox rather than competing with them.
A legal question runs underneath all of this: whether the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 protects the arrangement. That statute gives professional leagues a narrow antitrust exemption for selling broadcast rights collectively, but the text covers only the “free telecasting” of games. Courts have held it does not extend to pay, cable, or satellite distribution — which is how Sunday Ticket has always been sold.
The Jury Verdict
Trial ran three weeks in June 2024, from June 5 through June 26. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones both testified. Jurors saw evidence that ESPN had once proposed selling Sunday Ticket for as little as $70 per season with a team-by-team option, well below the $349 residential price for the 2023 season, and that the NFL together with CBS and Fox pays out more than $4.3 billion a year for Sunday afternoon rights.
On June 27, 2024, the jury found the NFL had violated antitrust law. It awarded $4.6 billion to the residential class and about $96 million to the commercial class, for a combined total of roughly $4.7 billion. Because federal antitrust law allows damages to be tripled, potential liability climbed as high as $14.4 billion, or about $450 million per team.
Why the Judge Threw the Verdict Out
On August 1, 2024, U.S. District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez granted the NFL’s motion for judgment as a matter of law and wiped out the award.
The ruling turned on two plaintiff experts. Economist Daniel Rascher had testified that without the NFL’s pooling arrangement, out-of-market games would have aired on free over-the-air or basic cable channels, making the consumer cost zero. Judge Gutierrez called that speculative, finding Rascher never adequately explained how those telecasts would actually reach viewers for free. A second expert, John Zona, offered models suggesting other distributors could have competed with DirecTV for Sunday Ticket rights. The court found those models flawed because they did not account for the absence of direct-to-consumer streaming during much of the class period and assumed away the subscription fees any competing cable or satellite carrier would still have charged.
The decision leaned on the December 2023 amendments to Federal Rule of Evidence 702, which raised the bar for admitting expert testimony. Under the revised rule, the party offering an expert must show the methods are “more likely than not” reliable. Judge Gutierrez concluded that once the expert testimony was excluded, “no reasonable jury could have found class-wide injury or damages.” He also faulted the jury for not following instructions and called its damages calculation “nonsensical” and based on “guesswork and speculation.”
The Ninth Circuit Appeal
Subscribers appealed. A three-judge panel — Circuit Judges Holly Thomas and Anthony Johnstone, with Senior U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow sitting by designation — heard oral arguments on March 9, 2026. The core question is whether Judge Gutierrez abused his discretion in excluding the expert testimony and taking the verdict away from the jury.
The panel sounded skeptical of the trial court. Judge Lefkow called the decision to override the jury “remarkable” and said she had a “fundamental problem” with the NFL’s position. “As a trial judge, there have been many times that I can point to where the jury came to result that, as long as the instructions were valid and correct, we accept the jury’s verdict,” she said. “This judge, remarkably very soon after the verdict, decides to take it away from the jury.”
Judge Johnstone pressed the NFL on why college football broadcasting was not a fair comparison for the damages model, asking, “If that’s not a yardstick, what is?” He observed that “sophisticated parties” in college football have negotiated deals that put games on free broadcast channels, cutting against the trial court’s view that such a model was implausible. Judge Thomas questioned whether the college football comparison was inherently flawed given that college football lacks the Sports Broadcasting Act’s protection, but she also asked the NFL what would count as an acceptable comparison if college football were off the table.
As of mid-2026, the panel has not ruled. Decisions typically come within three to four months of oral argument.
What Happens Next
The Ninth Circuit has three basic paths: reinstate the jury verdict, order a new trial, or affirm Judge Gutierrez and end the case at the district court level. A ruling is expected in 2026.
Whichever side loses is likely to seek Supreme Court review, and the NFL has reason to think it would be heard sympathetically. In 2020, when the Court declined to take the case at an earlier stage in NFL v. Ninth Inning, Inc., Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately to say the denial was not a signal on the merits. He said the Ninth Circuit’s suggestion that antitrust law might require teams to negotiate individual broadcast contracts “appears to be in substantial tension with antitrust principles and precedents,” compared pooling broadcast rights to the cooperative scheduling that makes professional football possible, and invited the NFL to bring the issue back after a final judgment.
Until the appeal is decided, no money is being distributed. The overturned verdict has no legal force, and any payout to class members depends on the Ninth Circuit reversing Judge Gutierrez or on a later settlement.
Sunday Ticket Today
The lawsuit covers DirecTV subscribers only, through February 2023. Beginning with the 2023 season, the NFL moved Sunday Ticket from DirecTV, which had carried it since 1994, to YouTube TV. The switch to streaming made the package easier to access but did not change the bundled, no-single-team pricing structure at the center of the case. For the 2025 season, returning subscribers paid $378 for the season pass or $480 with RedZone, and new subscribers got a first-season rate of $276. There is still no single-team or single-game option.