Subscribers of Sunday Ticket, the sports package that broadcasts National Football League regular season games unavailable to fans on local affiliates, filed a lawsuit against Google, which has a multibillion-dollar deal with the NFL allowing it to exclusively hold the broadcast rights for Sunday Ticket games shown on YouTube starting with the upcoming season.
In the 2019 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversing the district court’s dismissal of the original lawsuit for failure to state a claim of an antitrust action, the case was explained this way:
Each NFL team entered into a “Teams-NFL Agreement” with the NFL to pool their telecasting rights and give the NFL the authority to exercise those rights. Acting on behalf of its teams, the NFL entered into two additional agreements licensing the teams’ telecast rights. Under the “NFL- Network Agreement,” CBS and Fox coordinate to create a single telecast for every Sunday-afternoon NFL game, and the NFL permits CBS and Fox to broadcast a limited number of what are known as local games through free, over-the-air television.
Under the “NFL-DirecTV Agreement,” the NFL allows DirecTV to obtain all of the live telecasts produced by CBS and Fox, package those telecasts, and deliver the bundled feeds to NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers. Plaintiffs alleged that defendants’ interlocking agreements work together to suppress competition for the sale of professional football game telecasts in violation of §§ 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.
The subscribers in the new lawsuit want Google to supply information — including retail pricing, rights fees and subscriber numbers — for their case against NFL and DirecTV; DirecTV hosted Sunday Ticket before Google. In their case against the NFL, the subscribers accused the NFL, its teams and DirecTV of conspiring to limit the availability of televised games, thus boosting the price for Sunday Ticket.
The NFL has denied the claims of a conspiracy, stating that the plaintiffs’ had not identified “any evidence that could transform a lawful exclusive distribution agreement into an unlawful antitrust conspiracy.”
The plaintiffs claim Google gave only three documents, what the plaintiffs called “summary presentations,” regarding its Sunday Ticket deal and the paucity of information “does not even scratch the surface” of relevant information. “Evidence that the NFL imposed restrictions on Google will support plaintiffs’ claims that the NFL imposed these same restraints on DirecTV during the class period, to the detriment of consumers,’ the plaintiffs’ lawyers claimed.