Almost a thousand dollars. That’s what Sen. Mike Lee says fans spent to watch every NFL game last season across cable and streaming subscriptions. The FCC’s own estimate runs higher — north of $1,500 if you go platform by platform. Ten platforms. One sport. One season. CBS, FOX, NBC, ABC, ESPN, Peacock, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Netflix, NFL Network — congratulations, you’ve subscribed to all of them, and you still missed a game that was inexplicably on ESPN+ at 3pm on a Sunday.
The Department of Justice opened a formal antitrust investigation into the NFL’s broadcast practices on April 9. According to a government official, it’s “about affordability and creating an even playing field for providers.” That framing is almost comically understated. What’s actually happening is that federal regulators are finally asking whether the league has been running a legal cartel with the government’s own blessing — and doing so using a law that hasn’t been meaningfully examined since the Beatles hadn’t released their first album yet.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 gave the NFL and other professional leagues the right to pool broadcast rights and negotiate collective TV deals without running afoul of antitrust law. Congress passed it specifically because courts had found the NFL’s collective TV arrangements were, in fact, an antitrust violation. So the NFL lobbied its way to an exemption. The law is narrow — it applies only to “sponsored telecasting,” meaning free, over-the-air broadcast television. It says nothing about cable. Nothing about satellite. Nothing about streaming. Amazon didn’t exist in 1961. The internet didn’t exist in 1961. There were three television channels. Three.
The NFL will tell you — it already has told you, in its official response to the probe — that “over 87% of our games” remain on free broadcast television. Which is technically true the way it’s technically true that a restaurant serves salads. Most of what you want isn’t on the salad menu, and the salads they offer are fine, but the reason you drove 20 minutes and paid for a babysitter was the steak, and the steak is on Amazon Prime. The playoff game is on Peacock. The Christmas games were on Netflix. The steak costs extra.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr put it plainly in March: “There is a point at which you sort of tip the scale, and they’ve just put too many games behind a paywall, and then that whole exemption collapses.” He also noted — and this is the legal crux that should be making NFL lawyers nervous — that the SBA exemption may not even apply to streaming deals in the first place. The collective negotiating power the NFL has been wielding to distribute Thursday Night Football through Amazon, Christmas games through Netflix, and playoff exclusives through Peacock? That might have never been legally protected to begin with.
This is not a market outcome. The NFL didn’t end up on 10 platforms because consumers sorted it that way through their preferences and purchasing power. The league negotiated those deals collectively, using leverage it only has because Congress handed it an exemption 65 years ago under conditions that bear no resemblance to the current media environment. If 32 independent teams had each tried to sell their own local broadcast rights, they couldn’t have built this structure. The collective deal is the whole mechanism. And the collective deal may have always been operating outside the SBA’s actual scope.
There’s a Sunday Ticket antitrust class action that’s worth a footnote here: a jury awarded fans $4.7 billion in June 2024, the trial judge overturned it in August 2024, and the case is currently on appeal at the Ninth Circuit. The NFL won that round. But the appeals court hasn’t ruled, the DOJ probe is separate and doesn’t require private plaintiffs or expert testimony, and the FCC has its own parallel docket with 8,500+ public comments that skew heavily toward “this is insane and we are furious.”
Here’s the thing about the NFL’s position that makes it genuinely hard to defend: the league built the most valuable media property in American sports, then used that value to fragment distribution to maximize revenue, then used a law designed for a three-network world to make that fragmentation legally bulletproof. It worked brilliantly as a business strategy. It is also, if you care about the basic principle that monopoly exemptions come with conditions, a years-long exploitation of a loophole. The DOJ is asking whether the loophole was even real. That question is long overdue.
If the probe produces actual enforcement — legislation, consent decree, court ruling, anything — it doesn’t just affect the NFL. Every professional sports league in America is watching this. The structure of how sports media gets sold, packaged, and delivered to fans could look fundamentally different in five years than it does today. That’s not speculation about whether the DOJ will win. It’s just the reality that regulatory pressure of this kind, once seriously applied, tends to produce settlements and workarounds even when it doesn’t produce verdicts.
The NFL has been the most powerful single entity in American sports for thirty years. Turns out that power had a receipt. The DOJ just asked to see it.