After comments from President Trump set off a new wave of protests from NFL players, football fans started to realize that they weren’t going to be able to ignore the political speech from members of their favorite teams.
Some disgruntled viewers expressed their frustrations by booing the players. Others blamed the teams, or the NFL. Still others, it seemed, took it out on their cable and satellite providers.
Now, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that DirecTV is allowing some customers who cite the protests to cancel and be refunded for their subscription to a Sunday Ticket package of NFL games, which costs about $280 for the season. This offer is a break from their regular policy, which does not allow refunds once the NFL season has started.
The Journal spoke with customers who were able to cancel their subscriptions, but when the newspaper spoke with customer service, the representatives gave several different answers, with one saying there would be no refunds, another saying customers could only get prorated refunds, and another saying only customers with certain packages or plans could receive refunds.
Football, as the Journal notes, has the largest TV audience of all sports, and Sunday Ticket is a highly popular and lucrative package for DirecTV that also earns the NFL $1.5 billion a year in licensing. For the past couple years, football viewership has been declining, with an 8 percent drop in viewers from 2015 to 2016, or a loss of about 1.4 million people.
Viewership of the weekend’s games was slightly higher than the Week 3 games from the previous year, however, despite Trump’s tweets to the contrary. (Although as Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley points out, any number of factors separate from protests or even football could contribute to the fluctuation.)
The weekend’s protests amounted to the largest display from the players yet, with about 180 players refusing to stand for the national anthem and three teams declining to stand on the sideline for it. The protests began last season, when then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem to protest police brutality and the killing of unarmed black men.
Friday, Trump said in a rally that athletes who protested were “sons of bitches” and called for them to be fired. On Sunday morning, when the height of the drama played out as players knelt and expressed support for their fellow players, Trump fired off a series of tweets calling fans to boycott the NFL. It was the third day in a row he had criticized players who protest. On Tuesday, Trump was back at it.
