NEW YORK (Legal Newsline) — The National Football League (NFL) has agreed to resolve antitrust concerns about its league-wide mandatory price floor policy, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced Nov. 15.
The NFL’s policy mandated that each of the league’s 32 teams must impose a price floor for secondary market ticket sales on the NFL’s Ticket Exchange. Under the arrangement, sellers could not list a ticket at anything less than face value. The NFL terminated the arrangement after Schneiderman’s office began looking into the issue.
“No sports fan should be forced to buy, or sell, a ticket at an artificially inflated price,” Schneiderman said. “Under the NFL’s price floor scheme, fans were forced to pay inflated prices for even the least desirable NFL games. That is a slap to both sports fans and free markets. My office will continue to fight for the rights of sports fans and concertgoers by ensuring that secondary markets are free and competitive. In the meantime, I encourage every NFL team—and every team in professional sports—to heed the call of all sports fans and remove price floors from every team-authorized secondary ticket market.”
The NFL paid a $100,000 penalty, which will go toward the costs of the multistate case.