The National Football League Prevails in Sunday Ticket Class Action Litigation

On August 1, 2024, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Judge Philip Gutierrez granted the NFL’s motion for judgment as a matter of law in the NFL “Sunday Ticket” Antitrust Litigation (Case 2:15-ml-02668-PSG-SK). His ruling vacated a multi-billion dollar jury verdict, based on his finding that the testimony of Plaintiffs’ economic experts was unreliable and thus should be excluded.

Compass Lexecon expert Professor Ali Yurukoglu testified on behalf of the NFL. Professor Yurukoglu’s testimony was critical in demonstrating that Plaintiffs’ experts’ damages analyses were unreliable and thus should be excluded.

Plaintiffs claimed that two classes of customers for its out-of-market NFL Sunday Ticket package—a residential class and a commercial class—were overcharged from 2011 to 2022 because the NFL clubs had “entered a set of agreements with each other and their broadcast partners that suppressed the output of telecasts of out-of-market professional football games, resulting in higher prices for Sunday Ticket.” In response, the NFL argued that Sunday Ticket was an important part of its overall strategy for distributing NFL games, with that strategy resulting in the vast majority of NFL fans receiving their preferred football games for free, a win for fans and a procompetitive outcome.

The Court noted that testimony from Professor Ali Yurukoglu was one of the main reasons why it excluded Plaintiffs’ experts’ testimony. Plaintiffs’ experts estimated damages based on an econometric model that assumed a but-for-world where an additional provider of NFL Sunday Ticket is introduced. Professor Yurukoglu explained that Plaintiffs’ experts’ “models irrationally predicted that consumers would pay higher prices from an alternative distributor of Sunday Ticket instead of purchasing from DirecTV,” and the Court pointed to this testimony as one of the key reasons for excluding Plaintiffs’ experts’ testimony.

Counsel for the NFL, Rakesh Kilaru, stated that: “Ali was an absolute rockstar. Nobody could question his brilliance as an economist. But he was even more impressive in the courtroom, providing an intuitive, engaging, and easy to follow explanation of complicated economic concepts. It was a truly outstanding performance by him and the excellent Compass team.”

Professor Yurukoglu was supported by a team at Compass Lexecon that included Ka Hei Tse, Josephine Xu, Ian MacSwain, Allan Zhang, Zoya Azhar, Linjun Peng, and Yuxin Wang.

The NFL was represented by counsel from Wilkinson Stekloff, including Beth Wilkinson, Brian Stekloff, Rakesh Kilaru, Max Warren, Jeremy Barber, Anastasia Pastan, Jenna Pavelec, Caroline Li, and Blake Neal; and from Covington and Burling, including Derek Ludwin and John Playforth.