Some of the most powerful figures in American sports are in Los Angeles this week as the nation’s top sports league defends itself against a lawsuit claiming televised games are the subject of a price-fixing scandal.
At issue is the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, which allows fans to watch all games each Sunday and not just the games broadcast by their local CBS and FOX stations.
While those broadcast games are free to watch in a team’s local area, Sunday Ticket charges $449 per year to watch what other parts of the country are seeing for free. Through last season, Sunday Ticket was only available through DirecTV, though it moves to YouTube TV beginning this upcoming season.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys who wields outsized influence even relative to his powerful position, testified in downtown Los Angeles on Monday, as reported by independent journalist Meghan Cuniff for her Substack, Legal Affairs and Trials. Jones is also returning for further cross-examination on Tuesday.
The football figures are defending the league against a class-action suit from Sunday Ticket subscribers that seeks “billions of dollars for what plaintiff attorneys describe as a years-long monopoly and price-fixing scheme that intentionally priced some fans out of the Sunday package to maintain high profits from broadcast deals with CBS and Fox,” Cuniff wrote.
The suit claims the NFL purposefully kept Sunday Ticket at a high price so that many could not afford it, forcing them to watch their local broadcasts and thereby increasing their viewership numbers, forcing the networks to pay the league more for broadcast rights.
If the suit is successful, the NFL may be forced to pay billions, perhaps even as much as $21 billion due to the possibility to triple damages in antitrust cases, as reported by the Associated Press.
Jones and Goodell insist there was not scheme to keep the price high. Instead, as Goodell argued, Sunday Ticket is “a premium product” and “should be priced accordingly.”
Their argument is undercut, however, by a videotaped deposition from another owner, Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots.
Kraft “seemed to connect the number of Sunday Ticket subscribers to the NFL’s desire ‘to keep this as a premium product that doesn’t devalue over the air, TV product,'” Cuniff reported.
“We’re not looking to get multitudes of people,” he added.
