wpr
  • wpr
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a year ago

This could mark the end of the league’s salary cap era, among other changes.

The NFL has been battling a major lawsuit over the past several months, one that involves their out-of-market game package: NFL Sunday Ticket. The argument was that the NFL violated antitrust laws with the package, due to the nature of out-of-market games being exclusively shown on Sunday Ticket.


On Thursday, a jury ordered the NFL to pay $96 million in damages to the commercial class, which includes the 48,000 businesses that paid for NFL Sunday Ticket from 2011 to 2022, and $4 billion to the residential class, which covers the 2.4 million residential subscribers of the package over the same period.


Because this was a federal antitrust case, $4 billion is allowed to balloon to $12 billion. For reference, the plaintiffs were asking for $21 billion in this case, so they could receive north of half of their requested number. Per Sportico , the NFL’s revenue last season was $19 billion, which means that if the $12 billion number sticks after a presumed series of appeals, it will almost certainly impact the league’s salary cap — at the very least.


Recently, Dallas Cowboys  owner Jerry Jones stated that he would actually be against a salary cap if teams were allowed to sell their individual out-of-market rights — which is almost assured to be part of the fallout of the NFL Sunday Ticket package. Get ready to hear a lot of that in the coming weeks, months and years, as owners of richer teams will likely try to make up the losses they’re taking in this lawsuit by blocking other clubs from revenue sharing.


Essentially, this case boiled down to whether the NFL’s antitrust exemptions for their broadcast applied to paid television, rather than just over-the-air broadcasts. Ultimately, the jury found in favor of the plaintiffs.


The league’s current television broadcast agreements run through 2033, but the NFL would likely have to renegotiate with FOX and CBS, their early and late game Sunday partners, if the structure of out-of-market broadcasts does change. For perspective, those two partners pay $4.3 million billion a year for their games while YouTube TV is dishing out $2 billion a year for NFL Sunday Ticket. To say the least, this will have a significant financial impact on the league.


Per a league memo that the Associated Press reported on , the NFL once looked at putting out-of-market Sunday games on cable television with FS1, ESPN, ESPN2, TBS, TNT, NFL Network and CBS Sports Network being landing spots. Under that structure, cable networks would have broadcast games at $9 million per game while FOX and CBS would have paid $10 million less per game.


So placing out-of-market games on cable would have been close to a break-even point with the league’s afternoon slate contracts, but it would have completely wiped out the $2 billion per year they currently receive for the NFL Sunday Ticket package. That is where individual teams selling their own out-of-market packages comes into play, along with Jerry Jones’ line of thought about how if there’s no revenue sharing with these out-of-market packages then there’s no incentive to have a salary cap in the league moving forward.




Continue Reading @ Justis Mosqueda 

Justis Mosqueda wrote:



I hope not. I had the sunday Ticket package with Direct Tv back in the day. This settlement isn't coming from NFL, Inc. It is coming from the teams. They will have a COVID like cap put on. (Only for a longer period of time.) They will raise ticket and concession prices. Merch will go up. Like everything else, the end consumer IE the fans will pay $ billion in the settlement not the league or the teams.


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beast
a year ago
PFT is guessing this means they'll push for 18 game seasons even more.


Though, the more I see this kind of case, the more I think the NFL could simply solve a lot of their issues by actually putting all teams legally under the NFL, and be one company, instead of 33 companies, with the 32 teams and the NFL, and then the owners could own a sub-franchise of the NFL instead of a different company.

Of course, owners would in theory have less control, therefore they would hate to do that, but the NFL basically has (in theory) control over all those things anyways but more indirectly.
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wpr
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a year ago
Aaron Nagler and Andrew Brandt discuss the verdict.




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dfosterf
a year ago
Today is the scheduled day for motions in this case. The range of outcomes is rather wide at between nothing and over 14 billion in damages.
beast
11 months ago

Today is the scheduled day for motions in this case. The range of outcomes is rather wide at between nothing and over 14 billion in damages.

Originally Posted by: dfosterf 


Or... the judge throws the entire case out, because the judge disagrees with the plaintiffs economics experts and disagrees with how the jury came up with their amount, which I'm assuming was based on the disliked economic experts and also assume the judge told the jury to ignore them, and they listened to them anyways, and therefore threw the entire case out.

That, or the NFL got into the judges pocket...

Because as PFT points out, the judge found that there was proof of antitrust violations, he just didn't agree with how they came up with the amount for punishment, and the judge could of ordered a new trail, or other methods to keep it moving forward, but instead, he just threw the entire thing out.
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wpr
  • wpr
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11 months ago

Or... the judge throws the entire case out, because the judge disagrees with the plaintiffs economics experts and disagrees with how the jury came up with their amount, which I'm assuming was based on the disliked economic experts and also assume the judge told the jury to ignore them, and they listened to them anyways, and therefore threw the entire case out.

That, or the NFL got into the judges pocket...

Because as PFT points out, the judge found that there was proof of antitrust violations, he just didn't agree with how they came up with the amount for punishment, and the judge could of ordered a new trail, or other methods to keep it moving forward, but instead, he just threw the entire thing out.

Originally Posted by: beast 



Interesting. I thought it would have to go to a higher court before getting tossed.
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beast
11 months ago

Interesting. I thought it would have to go to a higher court before getting tossed.

Originally Posted by: wpr 


The decision to toss the case, like most decisions is "subject to appeal".

And with this much money at stake, and the proof being there that a violation did happen, it's surely going to be appealed.

The question is now, "What, if anything, will the appeals court do?"


I know nothing about courts, and what the options are, but I'm very surprised that the judge tossed the entire case. I don't know if this is an option or not, but I would have thought he would of tried to keep the guilty verdict (or the civil case equivalent), but only tossed the damages amount verdict l, which I believe I have heard happen in criminal cases against people, so I assume it's also allowed in civil cases against companies, but that is an assumption, and I do know there are a lot of difference between criminal and civil courts.
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