NFL Hit With Antitrust Lawsuit Over Refusal To Let Teams Join Bluesky
An antitrust lawsuit has been filed against the NFL for its refusal to allow its teams to create official accounts on Bluesky.
Bluesky is a fairly new social media platform conceptualized by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and meant to rival X and Meta's Threads. As of February 2025, Bluesky has surpassed 30 million users — many of whom just didn't like the way Elon Musk was running X since he bought the platform in October 2022.
The NFL, though, has yet to officially embrace the new platform. Last month, New England Patriots VP of Content Fred Kirsch told fans during a Q&A session that the NFL has not yet allowed its teams to join Bluesky.
There are a number of reasons for that. But, like all major business decisions, it really boils down to money.
The NFL is facing an antitrust lawsuit over its refusal to allow its teams to join new social media network Bluesky.
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The NFL has existing partnerships with all the more established social media platforms, including X, Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads), YouTube, Snapchat and LinkedIn that the league must honor. These agreements cover things like license fees, ad dollar splits and promises to sponsors. There are many, many stakeholders involved in these partnerships.
MORE: NFL Reportedly Told Teams To Shut Down Their Bluesky Accounts
"The NFL… is acutely aware of the league’s capability to be a business kingmaker," Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal reported on Jan. 30. "If all 32 teams organically got on Bluesky, the platform could create a robust NFL news hub out of those accounts without much work at all. The NFL knows exactly what that would be worth to Bluesky, and wants to be paid for it.
"That requires an official relationship, which involves lawyers and negotiations, and more time than teams think it should."
Plaintiffs In Antitrust Lawsuit Would Rather Use Bluesky Than X
The civil action, originally reported by Matthew Belloni of PUCK, challenges the NFL's refusal to allow teams to operate on Bluesky. The complaint suggests that the league's decision is not just about strategy, but rather direct suppression of competition.
According to the complaint, some fans "do not want to have to follow their teams on Elon Musk’s X platform," and consumers "should be free to decide that they do not want to do business with a particular outlet or brand."
RELATED: Sports Media Is Leaving X For Bluesky Because They Lost The Election
So, for the individuals who filed the complaint, it's not really about justice from a legal standpoint. It's about their disdain for Musk and their desire to flee his X platform in favor of safe-space Bluesky.
But is it really a safe space? Jesse Singal of The Free Press reported in December that while he expected Bluesky to be a "kinder, gentler" left-wing version of X, he found that the new platform actually has a moderation problem with "staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing."
"As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place," Singal wrote. "And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one — in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform."
The Elon Musk haters certainly don't want to hear that.
Since Bluesky's inception, multiple prominent Left-wing voices have publicly announced their departure from X because of their disdain for Elon Musk.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Regardless of the plaintiffs' skewed reasoning for filing the suit in the first place, the NFL is expected to take a defensive stance by trying to force the case into arbitration rather than an open court trial. And the first question will be whether any of the plaintiffs have agreed to last year’s NFL.com terms and conditions, which consent to arbitration and waive the ability to proceed as a class-action.
The NFL, along with other major professional sports leagues, does enjoy a couple of important antitrust exemptions. But the Shield is not immune from all liability and has faced similar lawsuits in the past.
In 2015, consumers filed a class-action suit alleging that the NFL and DirecTV created an illegal monopoly over the broadcast of live games. A jury awarded $4.7 billion in damages to residential and commercial subscribers, but a federal judge overturned the verdict in August 2024.