Members of Congress lined up to take shots at the National Football League during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, accusing the league of exploiting a 1961 antitrust exemption to scatter games across a growing maze of paid streaming platforms, and sticking fans with the bill. Republicans and Democrats alike questioned whether the Sports Broadcasting Act still serves the public it was meant to protect, the New York Post reported.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell declined to testify. The league's chair was empty. The complaints were not.
At the center of the fight is a simple question with enormous financial stakes: Should the NFL keep a legal privilege designed to put football on free television when the league now sells games to Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Netflix, YouTube, and at least six other streaming services? The Federal Communications Commission has previously estimated that watching every pro football game could cost a consumer roughly $1,500.
Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust, laid out the math. The NFL's first league-wide television agreement was worth $4.65 million annually. In 2021, the league signed an 11-year media rights package worth roughly $113 billion.
Fitzgerald told the committee that the original law had a clear purpose, and that the NFL has outgrown it.
"The Sports Broadcasting Act was designed to facilitate the distribution of games through free over-the-air television. It was not intended to provide a perpetual shield for leagues to coordinate the sale of media rights across every new technology and distribution platform that emerges."
Fitzgerald went further, arguing that the exemption now works against ordinary consumers.
"Because they do not follow America's antitrust laws for television agreements, they can charge consumers inflated prices that would otherwise be illegal."
The subcommittee chairman framed the hearing as a reckoning sixty-five years in the making. Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act to help fans, he said. The question now is whether the league held up its end of the deal.
"Sixty five years later, however, it is fair for this body to ask whether the professional sports leagues have kept up their end of the bargain. In my opinion, they have not, and sports fans are paying the price because of it."
A Judiciary Committee staff report released ahead of the hearing supports that view, arguing the NFL has stretched its antitrust exemption well beyond what Congress envisioned when it passed the legislation. The details of the report were not made public in full, but its conclusion is blunt: the league's current distribution model does not match the law's original intent.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican, kept his framing direct. As lawmakers from both sides of a Congress that rarely agrees on anything found common ground on the NFL issue, Jordan put it plainly.
"We all love football, but we're trying to ask the question: Does it work for our constituents because we know it works for the NFL."
Rep. Jamie Raskin, described in the Post's reporting as a Democrat from Ohio, joined the criticism from his side of the aisle. Raskin called the league's broadcast arrangements fundamentally lopsided.
"Fundamentally unfair that the league should get billion-dollar deals, but the fans are left out in the cold."
But Raskin added a partisan twist. He cited a recent report alleging that Fox Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch personally lobbied President Trump at a White House dinner to crack down on NFL streaming deals. Raskin suggested the hearing, and a related Department of Justice investigation into whether the NFL has engaged in anticompetitive tactics, had a corporate beneficiary in mind.
"The DOJ's investigation, like this hearing, appear to be all about helping Mr. Murdoch get a better broadcast deal for Fox."
The accusation is worth noting but hardly dispositive. Fox Corp., described as one of the NFL's largest over-the-air broadcast partners, has argued that the Sports Broadcasting Act was intended to maximize access to games through broadcast television rather than splinter audiences across streaming platforms. Fox Corp. is a sister company to News Corp., the corporate parent of the New York Post. The Post reported it sought comment from both Fox Corp. and the NFL.
Whatever Raskin's theory about the hearing's motives, the consumer problem he described is the same one every other lawmaker at the table identified. The NFL's billion-dollar media empire has grown while fans' ability to watch games without paying for a stack of subscriptions has shrunk. That fact doesn't change based on who benefits from pointing it out.
Fox News contributor and OutKick founder Clay Travis testified before the committee and did not hold back. Travis told lawmakers that the league's streaming expansion has turned a right guaranteed by law into a product sold at a premium.
"Every single day, sports fans are getting gouged now for the opportunity of watching their favorite teams."
Travis drew a direct line between the 1961 law and the current cost burden on households. Congress has a long history of passing landmark legislation with clear consumer-protection intent, and Travis argued the NFL has simply walked away from the bargain.
"Fans now pay far more money every year for something that by law in 1961 you all guaranteed for them should be free."
He went further, accusing the league of acting outside the law's boundaries.
"The NFL quite clearly... is violating the plain intent of the law."
Travis's testimony frames the issue not as a regulatory technicality but as a pocketbook betrayal. The SBA gave the NFL a carve-out from normal antitrust rules so that leagues could pool their broadcast rights and deliver games to the widest possible audience on free TV. The trade-off was access. If the access disappears behind paywalls, the justification for the exemption disappears with it.
The NFL has defended its streaming push as a lawful evolution of its media strategy. The league has framed streaming as a complement to broadcast television rather than a replacement, a distinction that matters legally even if it rings hollow to a fan juggling subscriptions.
Fitzgerald acknowledged the NFL's argument that revenue-sharing arrangements help preserve competitive balance among teams. That's a real consideration, the league's pooled media revenue is one reason small-market franchises can compete with big-market clubs. But the subcommittee chairman's acknowledgment didn't translate into agreement. The question before Congress isn't whether revenue sharing is good for the league. It's whether the legal shield that enables it still serves the public.
Goodell's decision not to testify left the NFL without a face at the hearing. When Congress demands answers on a matter of public concern, declining to show up is a choice that speaks for itself. It does not suggest a league confident in its legal position.
The committee signaled that this hearing was a beginning, not an endpoint. Lawmakers plan to continue examining whether the Sports Broadcasting Act remains necessary in its current form and whether legislative reforms are needed to improve access and affordability for sports fans.
The DOJ investigation into the NFL's practices adds a separate track of pressure. Between a congressional inquiry, a federal probe, and a staff report that flatly accuses the league of exceeding its legal mandate, the NFL faces a level of institutional scrutiny it has not encountered on the broadcast front in decades.
The league's media rights deals are locked in through the early 2030s. Any legislative change would take time. But the bipartisan nature of the criticism, rare enough in today's Congress, suggests the political will exists to at least revisit the terms of the NFL's sweetheart arrangement.
Last season, NFL games aired on Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Netflix, YouTube, and six additional streaming platforms. That's a distribution model built for corporate revenue maximization, not for the factory worker in Green Bay or the retiree in Tampa who just wants to watch his team on Sunday without subscribing to half a dozen services.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 rested on a simple compact. Congress gave professional sports leagues an exemption from antitrust law. In return, fans got their games on free television. For decades, that deal held.
Now the NFL collects $113 billion in media rights, spreads games across a constellation of paid platforms, and sends its commissioner to skip the hearing where lawmakers want to know why. The league's antitrust exemption was a gift from the American public. The public has a right to ask what it's getting back.
When both parties in Congress agree that working Americans are getting a raw deal, the people handing out that deal should probably start paying attention.
