The NFL has long defended Sunday Ticket’s pricing and structure as reasonable because the league contends it is a premium product geared toward avid fans. Avid here means the fan is an NFL junkie, interested in all of the league’s games, not just a displaced Dallas Cowboys booster located outside of the team’s broadcast zone, only interested in Dallas’ games.
This paradigm is an NFL defense in the ongoing lawsuit brought by restaurants, bars, and average fans against the league over Sunday Ticket’s pricing and refusal to offer single-team packages. The league argues games are widely available to a team’s fans, and Sunday Ticket is really only servicing a small subset of fans who want more than just their favorite team. Now, a House Judiciary committee may have given the plaintiffs a new data point to use in the long running litigation.
The House Judiciary’s subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust released a 27-page report earlier this week, previewing Wednesday’s sports broadcasting hearing, that revealed the panel had done its own research to find that seven out of every 10 Sunday Ticket subscribers buy it to follow only one team.
“The Committee and Subcommittee obtained data from YouTube, the current exclusive Sunday Ticket distributor,” according to the report.
“The Committee and Subcommittee have discovered that when subscribers canceled their Sunday Ticket subscriptions, they receive a link to an optional survey. In this survey, YouTube asked consumers, ‘Why did you sign up for NFL Sunday Ticket?,’ … Over 70 percent of respondents answered that they subscribed to ‘watch my favorite [NFL] team, which is out of market[.]’ In other words, the vast majority of Sunday Ticket subscribers—over two-thirds— wanted to see only their favorite team, but the NFL’s collusion meant that the only way they could do so was to buy every game available through Sunday Ticket. Only 33 percent of the surveyed Sunday Ticket users said they subscribed to ‘watch as many NFL games as possible[.]’ To make the NFL’s inaccurate claims even worse, when asked why they canceled, 70 percent of respondents answered that they canceled Sunday Ticket because it is too expensive.”
Sunday Ticket shows only the Fox and CBS Sunday afternoon games being shown outside a user’s home market. A jury found in June 2024 that the NFL had colluded in pooling out of market rights into one service, which can cost over $400. However, a month later the judge overturned the verdict, contending the plaintiff’s witness testimony was flawed, as was the jury’s damage calculation.
That decision is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, which has heard oral arguments, so a decision could come at any time. If the case does return to the lower circuit–and many legal experts believe that will be the case–then look for the plaintiffs to seize on the Judiciary subcommittee’s report.
Wednesday’s hearing will focus more on the SBA and whether leagues like the NFL have been violating antitrust law. The SBA, passed in 1961, arrived when there were only a handful of broadcast stations. Cable, streaming, and satellite platforms would have been science fiction.
In the 1980s as some games moved to cable, and later to satellite and streaming, there were few, if any, voices that pointed out these broadcast platforms might run afoul of the SBA. That changed recently, reportedly at the behest of Fox Corporation, which worries if the NFL re-opens its broadcast contracts, it may not be able to keep up with the resources of streamers. Now the Department of Justice is investigating the NFL’s media deals. And so is the Judiciary Committee, which asked NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to testify. He declined.
The 27-page report is a heavy broadside against the NFL, strongly arguing the SBA has outlived its utility and it is time to strip the NFL of this antitrust exemption. Even if the SBA were to remain, there is still the argument that it only covers CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC.
The NFL could have a valid argument absent the SBA, that pooling of broadcast rights still passes the antitrust sniff test because consumers get those games for free and so are not harmed. As for games on ESPN, Amazon Prime, and the handful on Netflix, the league could contend those platforms are just as widespread as broadcasters.
Sunday Ticket, though, could be more exposed. Forcing consumers to buy all the out of market games, rather than just one team, could be a tougher antitrust sell as the service compels the subscriber to buy all out of market games.
“The results shown in the data suggest that the current model of placing many NFL games behind a paywall, especially the Sunday Ticket service, is harming consumers by forcing them to pay for a large package of NFL games when they only want to see a handful of games from a single team,” the Judiciary report concluded.