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Criminal trials boil down to one issue — did the defendant do it? Civil trials have two big questions. Did the defendant do it, and if so what was the financial harm?
The NFL’s last major antitrust trial, from 38 years ago, resulted in a finding that the NFL did violate the law as to the USFL, but that the USFL failed to prove any financial harm. In the ongoing Sunday Ticket trial, the testimony has pivoted to competing economic expert witnesses regarding the losses to consumers resulting from the NFL’s alleged antitrust violations.
Financial damages take on even greater importance in antitrust cases, since by law the amount gets tripled after the verdict is entered.
Here’s where we press pause to make a big-picture assessment. This is a major trial that could result in a billion-dollar verdict against the NFL and that could force the league to revolutionize the way games are distributed to consumers. And hardly anyone is covering it. We’ve had to constantly search for any bits and pieces we can find, and we’re often finding them in non-mainstream news sites.
Via Craig Clough of Law360.com, Thursday’s testimony featured the last witness from the plaintiff’s case-in-chief and the first witness from the defendant’s case-in-chief. Both are economic experts who battled over the impact of the alleged effort to keep the price of Sunday Ticket high — and to keep the number of subscribers low.
That’s how it almost always goes in cases where the losses require careful analysis and calculation. The plaintiff has high numbers, and the defendant pokes holes in the calculation and/or presents lower numbers.
Earlier in the week, Daniel A. Rascher (the director of academic programs and a professor in the sport management master’s program at the University of San Francisco) testified that the damages exceed $7 billion. On Thursday, John Douglas Zona, who has a Ph.D. in economics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, testified that the price for Sunday Ticket was…
Source link : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sunday-ticket-trial-pivots-battle-115034637.html
Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-06-15 11:50:34
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