The National Football League will face an antitrust class action over claims that the structure of its “Sunday Ticket” package on DirecTV forces viewers to choose between buying every out-of-market game or none.
Judge Philip S. Gutierrez formally conferred class action status on the long-running litigation, which is back at the US District Court for the Central District of California after a brief trip to the US Supreme Court’s doorstep. The justices declined to shut down the case in late 2020.
The ruling represents a significant win—albeit a preliminary one—for the customers leading the lawsuit, which seeks to dismantle the licensing deals behind Sunday Ticket. The package runs to at least $294 per household and can cost thousands for commercial customers like bars.
Gutierrez, writing late Tuesday, certified separate classes of residential and commercial Sunday Ticket subscribers. The antitrust issues raised by their claims present “common questions capable of being established through a common body of evidence,” he said.
The licensing agreements represent “direct, class-wide evidence of an antitrust violation,” the judge wrote in a ruling docketed Wednesday. “If the contracts match up to the allegations, then there will be a violation applicable to the whole class.”
The suit, filed in 2019, takes aim at a rights-pooling agreement...
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