Catching the football game with friends at a local bar always sounds like a great Sunday option. Not if you're a bar owner under the mercy of the NFL and DirecTV's exclusive $12 billion television deal, though.
That's what led to attorney Michael Hausfeld filing a major class-action antitrust lawsuit Monday (July 13) against the NFL and DirecTV, pertaining to their stranglehold on out-of-market games. Hausfeld filed the lawsuit on behalf of The Mucky Duck, a San Francisco pub, but upon hearing this, many American bars and restaurants could want in on this complaint as well.
Essentially, Hausfeld wants to loosen the strangehold that the NFL and DirecTV have on bars — of 51 to 100 occupants — that must pay $2,314 for the Sunday Ticket package in the 2015 NFL season so their patrons could watch out-of-market games. Larger venues, like a Las Vegas hotel, will have to pay more than $120,000 this fall for that same privilege.
"DirecTV's arrangement with the NFL allows the Defendants to restrict the output of, and raise the prices for, the live broadcast of NFL Sunday afternoon out of market games," a portion of the lawsuit reads, as reported by Deadline.com. "Every NFL member team owns the initial rights to the broadcast of that team's games. However, the teams have chosen to collude with each other, and to grant the NFL the exclusive right to market those games outside each team's home market. But for the NFL teams' agreement in which DirecTV has joined, teams would compete against each other in the market for NFL football programming, which would likely induce more competitive pricing."
Furthermore, the class-action suit alleges that, due to the exclusivity of the NFL-DirecTV deal, establishments don't have any options and are forced to pay up or only offer local games. In addition, had the deal not been exclusive, it would have allowed for other multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to aggressively compete for NFL fans as consumers.
"Of the 4 major professional sports in this country — baseball, basketball, hockey, and football — the only one with an exclusive out-of-market broadcasting arrangement is the NFL/DirecTV Sunday Ticket," the lawsuit reads. "In contrast to the NFL's exclusive deal with DirecTV, the NBA, the NHL, and MLB offer their live out-of-market game packages through both DirecTV and cable sports networks, including, for example, various sports networks owned by Comcast."
The NFL and DirecTV extended the contract for their Sunday Ticket last October. If lawyer Michael Hausfeld's name sounds familiar, it's because he's one of the most prominent antitrust attorneys in the U.S., especially on landmark sports cases, as documented by ESPN.
To read the entire class-action lawsuit, click here.
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