Sunday Ticket Ruling Restores Liability but Not the $4.7 Billion
Friday's headlines said the $4.7 billion verdict was reinstated. The opinion restores the jury's finding of liability, wipes out the dollar figure and orders a new damages trial.
Headlines on Friday said a federal appeals court had reinstated the NFL's $4.7 billion Sunday Ticket verdict; the headline on the Associated Press story as run by regional papers read "Appellate court revives $4.7 billion 'Sunday Ticket' antitrust verdict against the NFL." The last operative sentence of the opinion says something narrower: the case goes back "to reinstate the jury's liability verdict and hold a new damages trial."
In the Ninth Circuit's opinion filed Friday, Oct. 30, 2026, a three-judge panel restored the jury's finding that the NFL was liable in the Sunday Ticket antitrust class action. It also agreed with the trial judge that the jury's roughly $4.7 billion damages award cannot stand. The liability finding is back, the dollar figure is gone, and no date exists yet for the new trial that will set another one.
The panel was Circuit Judges Holly A. Thomas and Anthony D. Johnstone and U.S. District Judge Joan H. Lefkow of Illinois, sitting by designation. Johnstone wrote the opinion. It reverses the exclusion of two economists' testimony, Dr. Daniel Rascher's and Dr. Douglas Zona's, and the resulting judgment as a matter of law for the NFL, the step by which a judge sets a verdict aside. It affirms the order granting a new trial on damages.
The sequence matters. On Thursday, June 27, 2024, the jury found the NFL liable "on every element" of the subscribers' antitrust claims. On Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024, Judge Philip Gutierrez threw that finding out. The panel said he went too far: by inquiring beyond the reliability of the experts' methods and the sufficiency of their data, the district court "exceeded its gatekeeping role under Federal Rule of Evidence 702." The ruling came 855 days after the verdict.
The experts are back in front of a jury
Rascher, an economist at the University of San Francisco, built what lawyers call a yardstick: a real market that stands in for one that does not exist. His stand-in was telecasts of games between the Top 25 college football teams. The opinion notes that college football once had an exclusive broadcasting deal like the NFL's, until the Supreme Court invalidated it in NCAA v. Board of Regents in 1984. Without the NFL's agreements, Rascher testified, the games would air on over-the-air and basic cable channels at no extra charge, as college games do on Saturdays.
The district court had dismissed that as "ipse dixit," an assertion resting on the speaker's say-so. Johnstone answered in terms a fan can follow:
"This is how yardsticks work: They rely on outcomes from a comparable market in the real world to predict outcomes for the relevant market in a but-for world."
Judge Anthony D. Johnstone, Ninth Circuit opinion
The "but-for world" is the market as the plaintiffs say it would look without the NFL's agreements. Whether college telecasts are close enough to NFL telecasts is, the panel held, a question for jurors: "Reasonable jurors may debate whether college and professional football telecasts are sufficiently similar or how out-of-market NFL games would have become available in the absence of the NFL's anticompetitive conduct. But those questions are for the jury to decide."
At the March 9 argument, as Sportico reported, Paul D. Clement argued for the NFL that a better yardstick would be another pro league, such as the NBA.
Zona offered two models. In his "direct-to-consumer" version, if the NFL granted telecast rights to one additional competitor, the price of DirecTV Sunday Ticket "would drop by 49.7%." His separate "NFL Tax" model estimated the package would have been 24.6% cheaper "if the company were allowed to set its profit-maximizing price." The panel held the district court never analyzed that second model at all.
The rule the panel applied fits in three sentences: But opinions are neither unfounded nor unreliable merely because they are impeachable. Such opinions are for the jury to weigh at trial. Once a jury does so, its verdict must stand unless it is clearly not supported by the evidence.
The $4.7 billion was a subtraction
The part of the opinion that most coverage skipped concerns the money. The jury awarded "exactly $4,610,331,671.74 for the residential class and $96,928,272.90 for the commercial class," the opinion says. The district court inferred how the jury got there, and the panel wrote that the total "is almost certainly the result of" taking the number of members in each class and multiplying it by $191.26, and held that the district court "acted within its discretion when it inferred how the jury arrived at its award."
The figure $191.26 is a list price of $294 for the 2018 and 2019 seasons minus $102.74, Zona's disputed estimate of the average price residential subscribers paid. The jury instruction defined damages as the difference between the prices subscribers actually paid and the prices they would have paid had there been no anticompetitive conduct. A gap between a list price and a discounted price is a different thing.
| Class | Members counted in the opinion | Jury award | Award per member |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | 24,105,049 | $4,610,331,671.74 | $191.26 |
| Commercial | 506,788 | $96,928,272.90 | $191.26* |
| Total | $4,707,259,944.64 | ||
| Trebled total | $14,121,779,833.92 |
Source: Ninth Circuit opinion, No. 24-5493 (counts and awards); per-member and totals computed by Daybreak Wire. *Award divided by members; 506,788 x $191.26 is $96,928,272.88, two cents under the award.
That difference, the panel wrote, "reflected a discount, not an overcharge." And the subtraction never touched the bars. Commercial subscribers, the opinion says, paid "an order of magnitude higher than the residential prices," anywhere from thousands to more than $100,000 a season depending on the size of the establishment, and the figure "did not account for what commercial subscribers paid at all." The commercial award is 2.06% of the total.
The jury's number sat between the two experts' models. It adopted neither.
Then there is the $14.1 billion that also circulated. Antitrust law provides for multiplying damages by three, and $14,121,779,833.92 is that multiplication applied to the discarded award, so it is not a live number either. The "$21 billion" that appeared in some coverage matches the roughly $7 billion the subscribers sought, tripled (Rascher's model was $7.01 billion); it was never a verdict.
The panel decided two other things the same day, in an unpublished memorandum that is "not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3." It affirmed certification of the damages classes under Rule 23(b)(3). And it revived the subscribers' injunctive claims under Section 16 of the Clayton Act, which the district court "never evaluated," while asking that court to check whether they are "moot now that the contract between the NFL and DirecTV has expired."
Who is in the class, and who is not
The residential class, according to the court-notice site, is all DirecTV residential subscribers who bought Sunday Ticket between June 17, 2011 and Feb. 7, 2023; the commercial class is the same for DirecTV's business customers. Excluded are people who only got the package free and people who bought only the NFLST.tv streaming service.
The suit began in 2015 with a San Francisco bar, the Mucky Duck in the Inner Sunset. It was dismissed on June 30, 2017, and the Ninth Circuit revived it in 2019.
Two caveats. DirecTV was never tried; the claims against it went to arbitration. And the headcount is contested. The opinion counts 24,105,049 residential and 506,788 commercial subscribers, and the jury's residential award matches the first number times $191.26 to the cent. The Associated Press reported 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses, and Deadline and TheWrap gave the same figures, a tenth the size. The opinion does not say whether its figure counts people or subscriber-seasons, so no per-person division is attempted here.
One boundary is clearer. Sunday Ticket left DirecTV after the 2022 season for YouTube, in a seven-year deal reportedly worth $14 billion that is not directly at issue, TheWrap noted. By the class's definition, someone who bought only on YouTube is outside it.
The NFL has a clock and no deadline for the trial
The league said in a statement that it was "disappointed by today's decision in the NFL Sunday Ticket appeal, the latest development in this case which has been ongoing now for over 11 years." It called its distribution model "by far the most fan-friendly distribution model in all of sports and entertainment," and said it "will be considering our options for seeking further appellate review."
The first real date is Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 40, a petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc is due 14 days after judgment unless the time is changed by order or local rule; the rule itself says en banc rehearing "is not favored." The clerk's entry date and any extension control; as of Oct. 31, no outlet reviewed has reported a petition. A Supreme Court petition is due 90 days after judgment, or after rehearing is denied: Thursday, Jan. 28, 2027 if no rehearing is sought. Pro Football Talk noted that Supreme Court review possibly would not be ripe until after a new damages trial.
Sportico's analysis says the case returns to federal court in Los Angeles and could remain there "for many months, if not years," with another appeal to follow. Sportico also raises a possible settlement, perhaps for a fraction of the damages plus more options for out-of-town fans; that is its speculation. None of the coverage read gives a date for the new trial.
For a fan, the practical picture is plainer. 9to5Google's price breakdown has existing customers paying $378 a year through YouTube TV, on top of the monthly subscription, or $480 through YouTube Primetime Channels, with a discount from $240 for eligible new subscribers. That $378 is $84 more than the $294 list price in the opinion, in nominal dollars. The reasons streaming prices keep rising run well beyond this lawsuit, and none of the coverage reports that the ruling changes the price.
The plaintiffs' theory, as Sportico describes it, is that without the league's arrangement teams would distribute games to other markets "for free or at lower prices," though Sportico calls it "uncertain" whether that would reach every fan.
As for money, there is none to claim. The notice site says "No money or benefits are available now because the lawsuit is not resolved," and that if any are obtained, "a separate notice will be issued about how to ask for a share." That page predates the 2024 trial, so its dates are stale. Class counsel will ask the court to approve fees and expenses, one reason class-action funds shrink before they reach members.
So the $378 is still $378 this weekend, and nothing reported so far says the ruling changes what Sunday Ticket costs or carries. Word about money, if it ever comes, will arrive the way the notice site says it will: in a separate notice.
