Despite their win that awarded $75,000 in March, Super Bowl XLV ticket holders are appealing the trial court decision. In a court document filed on August 21 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the ticket holders are asking the appeals court to overturn the district judge’s pretrial rulings.
The ticket-holder appellants claim that the district court judge erred in denying class certification to those who were completely deprived of their seats and others who were relocated to seats with obstructed views.
According to the court document, “The district court’s ruling that individual issues of reliance predominated over common issues was [in] error because the law recognizes a presumption of reliance in class cases asserting fraud based on a material omission.”
Furthermore, the ticket holders allege the district judge erroneously dismissed before the jury could hear the case contract and fraudulent inducement claims against the defendants who were closely related to Dallas Cowboys. More specifically, the appellants argue that “one or more of the Cowboys defendants were parties to the ticket contracts, or at a minimum, were agents of the NFL who had a contractual obligation to install the seats.”
The ticket holders claim that while the Cowboys installed 13,000 temporary seats to break attendance records, “they then failed to properly install all of the seats on time as promised, causing significant damages to be incurred by fans who on average spent thousands of dollars for the ‘once-in-a-lifetime,’‘bucket list’ experience of attending a Super Bowl involving two of the most storied franchises in all of professional sports—the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers.”
The appellees that include several Cowboys-affiliated defendants and the NFL are expected to file their brief as early as September 20.