The NFL Won A Lawsuit Over Its Bluesky Ban. Its Social Media Strategy Is Still A Loser

from the a-social-media-fumble dept

Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here—about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights—is worth digging into, because it reveals something deeply broken about how major sports leagues think about the internet.

The 2025-2026 NFL season just wrapped up, and along with it came a federal court ruling in a case called Brown v. NFL that most people missed entirely. Two football fans—one in Illinois, one in California—sued the NFL under the Sherman Act, claiming the league violated antitrust law by barring its teams from posting on Bluesky. The fans wanted to follow their teams—the Bears and the now-champion Seahawks—on the platform they actually use, rather than on Elon Musk’s X. The court dismissed the case for lack of standing, and honestly, that was probably the right legal outcome.

The fans couldn’t demonstrate a concrete injury—the information they wanted was still available, for free, on X. As the court put it, their grievance reduced to being “denied the ability to obtain real-time NFL team information on a private platform with which they are ideologically comfortable.” And “I don’t like Elon Musk” is not an antitrust injury. The Sherman Act targets conspiracies that restrain trade and harm competition—not content distribution preferences. You can’t force a private organization to distribute its content on the platform you like best, just as we’ve called out attempts to force social media platforms to carry content they don’t want to carry.

But the fact that the NFL is legally allowed to be this myopic doesn’t make it a smart business decision. You can be entirely within your rights and still be making a spectacularly bad call.

Since 2013, the NFL has had a “content partnership” with X (dating back to when it was the useful site known as Twitter). The deal lets X publish real-time highlights, and in return the league gets… money, presumably. As the court noted in its ruling:

Since 2013, the NFL and X (formerly Twitter, Inc.) have had a “content partnership.” It allows X to publish real-time highlights from football games, such as touchdowns. During the offseason, reporters post on X with news about team practices and other NFL-related topics, and fans on X discuss teams’ acquisitions of free agents and other roster changes. For example, during the NFL draft (the high-profile annual event in which teams select eligible players to join their rosters), X published more than one million posts concerning the NFL; these appeared on users’ screens more than 800 million times. The NFL has repeatedly renewed its partnership with X. Fans do not pay money to receive NFL news on X.

Fine. Lots of organizations have deals with social media platforms. But this just seems like self-sabotage: the NFL apparently used this partnership as justification to tell its own teams they couldn’t even exist on a competing platform. Multiple NFL teams—including the New England Patriots—had set up accounts on Bluesky, started posting, and were building audiences. And then the league office stepped in and told them to shut it all down.

From the ruling:

Initially, multiple NFL teams, including the New England Patriots, had accounts on Bluesky to communicate with fans….

As alleged, however, the NFL later instructed its member teams to delete their Bluesky accounts. But for this instruction, at least some NFL teams would use Bluesky. The Patriots’ vice president of content, Fred Kirsch, for example, has stated: “Whenever the league gives us the green light[,] we’ll get back on Bluesky.”

Yes, the (Super Bowl-losing) Patriots’ VP of content is publicly saying his team wants to be on Bluesky and is just waiting for the league to let them. This wasn’t a case of teams being uninterested. Teams saw the audience there, set up shop, and were actively communicating with fans—and the NFL made them stop.

As Front Office Sports reported at the time, the league specifically told the Patriots to take down their Bluesky account. The league apparently hasn’t even approved Threads—Meta’s X competitor—for team real-time updates either.

So the NFL has essentially decided that when it comes to the kind of real-time updates that fans actually care about, X is the only approved outlet. Everything else is locked out.

This is “broadcast-brain” thinking applied to the internet, and it’s spectacularly dumb.

The NFL is treating social media platforms the way it treats regional sports networks or its Sunday Ticket package: as exclusive territories to be carved up and sold to the highest bidder. In the television world, that model makes a certain kind of sense—there’s a limited amount of spectrum, a limited number of cable channels, and that scarcity creates value. But social media doesn’t work that way. There’s no scarcity. Posting an injury report on Bluesky doesn’t remove it from X. Cross-posting is literally free. The entire point of social media for a brand is to be everywhere your audience is.

And the audience, increasingly, is on Bluesky. As Mashable noted last year heading into the season, the NFL community on Bluesky had already hit a kind of critical mass:

You need the presence and regular posting of big names to legitimize a platform. It certainly helped that folks like Kimes and a large portion of the NFL writers at popular sports sites like The Ringer made Bluesky home. And last season it felt like Bluesky hit terminal velocity, where enough people joined that you could fully exit to the site for football content. And with the migration of the professionals, the shitposters naturally came along, too. Because that’s where the discussion was happening. There is genuine, easy-to-find, fun NFL talk on Bluesky with minimal interruptions from, say, weird ads or angry reply guys you might find on X.

That’s a real community. A vibrant, engaged community of exactly the kind of hardcore football fans that the NFL should be desperate to cultivate. These are, as Mashable noted, the “ball knowers.” They’ve moved to Bluesky because, well, X kind of sucks now for following sports. As Mashable also noted:

Bluesky does have a leg-up in some areas — Elon Musk’s site recently has proven unreliable for NFL fans. The site crashed the morning free agency launched, which is one of the most important days for NFL social media. And the sports tab — which used to be an easy, fun way to follow games in the Twitter days — degraded into near uselessness years ago. And, in general, X has morphed with Musk’s image, which is focused more on AI and politics — not things like following football. Of course you can still follow the NFL on X, but it does involve wading through more junk than it used to. Bluesky offers an interesting alternative in that regard.

So the most engaged, most knowledgeable football community has moved to Bluesky. The teams themselves want to be on Bluesky. And the NFL’s response to all of this is… to ban its teams from showing up.

It’s the digital equivalent of a local blackout (something we’ve been calling out for well over a decade)—punishing your most dedicated fans because of some deal you cut with a middleman in an effort to create an artificial and unnecessary scarcity.

Meanwhile, the platform the NFL is propping up with this exclusivity arrangement is one where fans who tuned in for the Super Bowl halftime show got to watch a significant chunk of the X user base have a full-blown racist meltdown over Bad Bunny performing. The NFL specifically chose Bad Bunny to appeal to a broader, more global audience—and the audience that actually appreciated the choice? They were on Bluesky where there was an overwhelming wave of support for the performance. The league is betting its real-time presence on the platform where its expansion strategy gets shouted down, while blocking teams from the one where those new fans are actually showing up.

This kind of control-freakery from the NFL shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the league’s behavior over the years. This is the same organization that has spent decades aggressively lying to bars, restaurants, and small businesses about the scope of its “Super Bowl” trademarks, sending threatening letters suggesting you can’t even say the words “Super Bowl” in an ad without a license—something that has never actually been true.

The NFL’s institutional DNA is “control equals value,” and they apply that logic to everything, from what a church can call its viewing party to which social media apps their teams are permitted to use.

The problem is that control-based thinking only works when you actually can control the ecosystem. You can (sort of) control which networks broadcast your games. You can control which streaming service gets Sunday Ticket. You cannot control where fans choose to talk about football on the internet. The conversation is going to happen whether the NFL’s official accounts are there or not. The only question is whether the league’s teams get to participate in it.

Any organization whose core business depends on fan engagement should be finding fans where they are, not herding them onto a single platform because you cut an exclusivity deal. Especially when that platform is increasingly known for being a hellscape of AI slop, political rage, and engagement-bait, while the platform you’re blocking your teams from is the one where people are actually talking about your product with genuine enthusiasm.

The NFL generates billions in revenue. And yet, when it comes to social media strategy, it’s stuck in a 2005 mindset. That’s not how any of this works anymore.

Someone at NFL HQ needs to understand that when your most passionate fans have moved to a new platform and your own teams are begging for permission to follow them there, the smart play is to let them go.

Filed Under: blackouts, exclusivity, fans, football, social media

Companies: bluesky, nfl, twitter, x