On November 21, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a Central District of California order dismissing with prejudice complaints filed on behalf of putative classes consisting of ticket holders and pay-per-view subscribers to the highest grossing boxing match of all-time, who were allegedly duped by the defendants’ failures to disclose a significant pre-fight injury.
- Plaintiffs alleged that the defendants—Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather, the match’s promoters, and HBO—concealed Pacquiao’s preexisting shoulder injury, which led to a less competitive fight. Plaintiffs claimed that they would not have paid to see the fight had they known about Pacquiao’s condition.
- The May 2015 match was promoted as “the fight of the century.” Both fighters had been world champions and were reported to be “the best ‘pound-for-pound’ fighters in recent history.” Despite its billing, however, the fight turned out to be a “yawner”: Mayweather defeated Pacquiao in twelve rounds in a unanimous decision.
- In the post-fight press conference, Pacquiao revealed that he had torn the rotator cuff in his right shoulder while training nearly a month before the fight. This contradicted comments by Pacquiao’s trainer just before the match that Pacquiao was in “top condition” for the fight—as well as a medical questionnaire in which Pacquiao stated that he had not suffered any injury of any kind.
- The district court dismissed the spectators’ complaints with prejudice, knocking out the plaintiffs’ allegations for failure to state a cognizable injury. In a punchy opinion, the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
- The panel rejected efforts by the plaintiffs to rebrand their injuries as that of “defrauded consumers,” rather than disappointed spectators. Stating that “[t]he human drama of athletic competition distinguishes this case from garden-variety consumer protection cases,” the court noted that “[a] sports match or game, unlike a consumer good or service, is defined only by a set of rules that are well-known to fans: the rest is determined by how the match is fought or the game is played.”
- Although the court stopped short of expressly adopting the “license approach” embraced by several jurisdictions—under which a paying spectator only has a license to view the event, not necessarily enjoy it—it concluded the plaintiffs lacked standing because they “essentially got what they paid for”: a full-length regulation fight between two boxing legends.
- The court further concluded that the pre-fight promotional statements regarding Pacquiao’s physical condition constituted mere puffery and that Pacquiao’s false responses to the medical questionnaire could not possibly have induced reliance since they were not publicly released before the fight.
- Finally, the court found the plaintiffs’ theory of liability to be “potentially boundless” since, taken to its logical extreme, the theory “would require all professional athletes to affirmatively disclose any injury—no matter how minor—or risk a slew of lawsuits from disappointed fans.”
- The case is In Re Pacquiao-Mayweather Boxing Litigation Match Pay-Per-View Litigation. Read more here.
