Appeals court revives NFL Sunday Ticket verdict and orders new damages trial
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has put back a jury's finding that the NFL broke antitrust law over Sunday Ticket, and it has ordered a new trial on how much money the league owes. The ruling was issued on 30 October 2026.
Sunday Ticket is the paid package that lets fans watch games their local channels do not show. Antitrust laws are rules against deals that limit competition and push up prices. The case was filed in 2015 as a class action, meaning one lawsuit brought on behalf of a large group. It covers 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses that paid for out-of-market games during the 2011 to 2022 NFL seasons on DirecTV. They argued that the league's agreements caused them to pay inflated prices.
A jury agreed with them in 2024. It found that the NFL conspired to inflate Sunday Ticket prices, according to Reuters. The eight-person jury, made up of five men and three women, awarded $4,610,331,671.74 in damages to the residential class, as the NFL reported. The headline figure was about $4.7 billion. That win did not last. U.S. District Court Judge Philip S. Gutierrez set the judgment aside, and in August 2024 he ruled that the plaintiffs' experts had used flawed economic models.
The appeals court has now reversed the trial judge's decision to exclude the subscribers' expert testimony. Expert testimony is evidence from specialists, here economists, who explain the market. By reversing that exclusion, the appeals judges have allowed that evidence back into the picture. They also reinstated the jury's liability verdict, which means the finding that the NFL is legally responsible for the conduct. The damages question, meaning how much money should be paid for any harm, now goes back to a trial court for a new hearing.
The NFL said it was disappointed by the appeals decision. The league said it will consider its options for seeking further review, which would mean asking a higher court to look at the case again.
Sunday Ticket has also changed hands since the games at the heart of the case. In 2023, the NFL moved the package from DirecTV to YouTube TV under a seven-year deal worth $14 billion. So the subscribers in this case are no longer the people paying for the package today. Their claim concerns what they paid in the years before the move.
For the households and businesses in the class, the fight now turns to a single question: how much, if anything, they should recover. Nothing about the football on screen changes this week. What changes is the legal path, which has moved back to the trial court and, possibly, to a higher court after that.
