The Packers are fighting to keep TV from becoming a free market

Sports 3 min 80 sources

A 1961 antitrust exemption lets 32 rival NFL teams sell their TV rights as one bundle and split the cash evenly. The DOJ and Congress are now poking at it — and the smallest team is the one most afraid.

Key takeaways

A 1961 law lets NFL teams sell their TV rights as one bundle and split the money evenly — $432.6 million each last season — which would otherwise be illegal collusion.
The Packers, the smallest-market team with no rich owner, are fighting hardest to keep the law, because the equal split is the floor that keeps them competitive.
The DOJ and Congress are now questioning the exemption, and the same pool-versus-sell-your-own fight is breaking out in college sports between small members and the rich SEC and Big Ten.

The Green Bay Packers issued a public statement this week opposing any major change to the Sports Broadcasting Act, a 65-year-old law most fans have never heard of. The team said its “ability to compete with the other 31 teams could be significantly impacted” if the law is reworked. [2]

That is unusual. The Packers rarely pick fights in Washington. But this one cuts to how the team stays alive.

What the law actually does

In 1961, a court ruled that the NFL’s plan to sell every team’s broadcast rights together broke antitrust law — the rules that stop competitors from acting as one to fix a market. So the league lobbied Congress for an exemption, and got it. The Sports Broadcasting Act lets pro leagues pool their TV rights and sell them as a single package, which would otherwise be illegal collusion. [2]

Here is what that means in practice. NFL teams do not negotiate their own TV deals. The league sells all the games to ESPN/ABC, NBC, CBS, Prime Video and Netflix as one bundle, then splits the money equally — 32 ways, regardless of how big or popular each team is. [2]

The numbers are public for exactly one team. The Packers are fan-owned, with no single rich owner, so by law they open their books. They show each team received a record $432.6 million from the national TV deals last season. [2] That is the same cheque the Dallas Cowboys cashed — and the Cowboys are worth several times what Green Bay is.

Why the smallest team cares most

Green Bay is the smallest media market in major American pro sports — a city of about 105,000. Under a normal market, where each team sold its own rights, big-city teams in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas would command far more for their broadcasts. Green Bay would get a fraction.

The pooled deal erases that gap. Everyone gets the same $432.6 million. The Packers also cannot do what the other 31 teams now can — sell a slice of the franchise to private-equity investors to raise cash. [2] So the equal TV split is not one revenue source among many for them. It is the floor they stand on.

That is why the team called the model “as foundational to the Packers’ existence as the very bricks in Lambeau Field.” [2] Remove the exemption, let teams sell their own rights, and the league sorts itself by market size and owner wealth — the exact sorting the pool was built to prevent.

Who is poking at it, and why now

Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the NFL’s use of the law. [2] A House Judiciary subcommittee, led by Wisconsin Representative Scott Fitzgerald, has questioned whether the league is even staying inside the act’s limits — much of the NFL’s content now sits behind paid subscriptions on Prime Video, Netflix and ESPN, not the free broadcast TV the 1961 law was written to protect. [2] Fitzgerald called the Packers’ concerns “laughable.” The team called it laughable that a Wisconsin congressman is leading the charge against his own state’s team. [2]

The NFL’s defence leans on the fan: over 87% of its games still air on free broadcast TV, and 100% air free in the home markets of the teams playing. [2]

The same fight, one league over

This is not only an NFL story. This week the NFL, the NFL players’ union and the NBA players’ association all wrote to Congress backing a college-sports bill — and specifically endorsing “the voluntary pooling of media rights” for college sports too. [3] The SEC and Big Ten, the two richest college conferences, oppose that pooling. [3]

The split tells you everything. The big want to sell their own rights and keep what their brand earns. The pool is defended by those who would lose a bidding war — the leagues’ smaller members, and the one NFL team with no owner to bail it out. The Senate commerce committee is expected to take up the bill after a markup this week. [3]

02 · Lesson · why it matters

A fair fight is something you build, not something competition gives you

Left alone, a market sorts people by what they started with. Sometimes the only way to keep a contest fair is to switch the market off in the places that would decide it.

A city of 105,000 should not be able to compete

Green Bay has about 105,000 people. The Dallas Cowboys play in a metro area of nearly eight million. If each NFL team sold its own television rights to the highest bidder, the gap between those two numbers would settle every season before kickoff. Big-market teams would earn many times more from TV, spend more, and win more. Green Bay would be a charming relic.

It isn’t. The Packers are one of the league’s proudest teams, and last season they banked the same $432.6 million in national TV money as the Cowboys did. Not because Green Bay earned it in a market. Because there is no market for it. The league sells every team’s games as one bundle and splits the cash 32 ways, evenly.

The market would have a clear answer — and that’s the problem

A market is a sorting machine. Let buyers bid and it finds a price, then ranks everyone by what they can command. That is exactly what you want when you are buying a car. It is exactly what you do not want inside a sports league.

Because a league only works if the games are uncertain. Nobody watches a season whose winner is fixed by city size in August. The product is the doubt. So the thing a free market is best at — finding the true price of each team’s audience — is the thing that would kill the league it’s running inside. The 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act exists to stop that. It is, in plain terms, a law that lets 32 rivals legally refuse to compete on one specific thing, so they can keep competing on the thing that matters.

The rule protects the player who can’t see the rule

Here is the part worth carrying. The team fighting hardest for the pool is the one the pool saves: Green Bay, smallest market, no billionaire owner, books open to the public by law. They know precisely what they’d lose, because they can see the cheque.

The teams quietest in its defence are the ones who would win a free market. You can watch the same split in college sports this week. A bill before Congress would let college conferences pool their media rights too — and the two richest, the SEC and the Big Ten, are the ones opposing it. The small members want the pool. The giants want to sell their own brand and keep it.

That is the general shape. The people a fairness rule protects are usually not the people who designed it or who feel its weight. The strong experience the rule as a tax on what they could otherwise take. The weak experience it as the floor they’re standing on. Remove it and the strong barely notice for a while. The weak disappear.

Fairness is built, and it can be unbuilt

We tend to think a level playing field is what you get when you stop interfering — let everyone compete and may the best win. The NFL is the opposite lesson. Its rough parity between a tiny town and a huge city is not natural. It is an engineered result, held up by a specific 65-year-old law, revenue sharing, a salary cap, and a draft that hands the worst teams the best new players. Take away the scaffolding and the “natural” order returns fast — and the natural order is the big eating the small.

This is why the current fight matters beyond football. The Department of Justice is investigating the exemption. A congressman — from Wisconsin, of all places — is questioning it. Much of the league’s content has drifted behind paid streaming subscriptions, which strains the original deal that the public got free games in return for the right to collude. Reasonable people can argue all of that. But the argument is not really about television. It is about whether you keep paying to hold a fair fight in place, or let the market decide who deserves to exist.

You are standing on scaffolding too

It is easy to read this as a sports curiosity and stop. Don’t. Most of the fairness you move through every day is built the same way — a rule quietly switching off a market that would otherwise sort you by where you started. The reason a sick child and a rich child can sit in the same classroom, the reason a small shop can survive next to a giant, the reason your vote weighs the same as a billionaire’s — none of it is what a free contest produces. It is scaffolding, put up on purpose, defended by the people it protects and resented by the people it costs.

The Packers can see their scaffolding because the law makes them open the books. You usually can’t see yours until someone starts taking it down. That is the humble part: the fair fight you’re in was built by people you’ll never meet, for reasons you may not feel until it’s gone.

03 · Lab · your turn

Sell the Rights

Run a league's TV deal two ways and feel how a free market sorts the field by city size while a pool keeps the contest worth watching.

04 · Hope · carry this

Sixty-five years ago, rival owners chose to give up a bidding war they could have won, so a town of a hundred thousand could keep its team — and it held. We are sometimes better than the market at deciding who deserves to stay in the game, and the proof is still standing in Green Bay.