The NFL currently faces antitrust issues on multiple fronts — legislative, regulatory, and executive.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft saw it coming a year ago.
As noted by Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, Kraft accurately presaged the situation last year, when the league hired Ted Ullyot as its new general counsel.
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“We’re at the top of the heap,” Kraft said at the time. “We’re going to be a target in antitrust, and in a lot of other ways, we’re going to need legal representation that knows how to go on the offensive and play defense to protect where we’re going.”
In 2024, the NFL had a multibillion-dollar verdict entered against it in a private antitrust lawsuit arising from the Sunday Ticket package. More recently, the issues have arisen through the political process, as the NFL embarks on an effort to renegotiate existing broadcast deals.
Regardless of the motivation, the possibility of entanglements has hidden in plain sight since the NFL first sold a package of games to cable networks in the late 1980s. More than forty years later, the long-wandering chickens are coming home to roost, from multiple directions. Where it goes from here remains to be seen.
It’s still a problem. One that the league has never before encountered in this specific way. And the potential consequences include forfeiting the ability to sell games in a league-wide bundle to cable, satellite, or streaming platforms — and possibly losing its entire antitrust exemption.
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