European Soccer and the Fight Against Online Piracy
Online piracy has become more prevalent with the improvements in technology and the internet in recent years. The anti-piracy firm MUSO reported a 29.3% increase in visits to piracy websites from the first quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022 with a reported 52.5 billion visits to piracy sites in the Q1 of 2022.[1] Visiting piracy sites could have serious consequences for users, such as making them more vulnerable to identity theft.[2] But it also imposes massive losses on those that own the rights to the material that is being pirated online. Online piracy is costing broadcasters and sports events organizers €28 billion per year.[3] European soccer leagues and those that broadcast their games are among those most affected by online piracy. For instance, the CEO of Italy’s soccer league (“Serie A”) estimated that his league alone has lost out on over €1 billion euros in the last 3 years.[4] Relatedly, approximately two million Italians use illegal live streams to watch games from Serie A.[5] Comparing this figure to the 5.5 million Italians who legally subscribed to watch Serie A games means that over a quarter of all Italians watch their domestic soccer league through illegally pirated livestreams.[6] This loss of legal viewership and resulting loss in profits for rights-holders has prompted Europe’s biggest soccer leagues to seek solutions that would decrease the prevalence of illegal streams and thus reduce losses for them and their broadcasters.
European soccer leagues have been trying to stop online piracy––particularly illegal livestreams of their matches––for years.[7] However, livestream piracy is incredibly difficult to stop because new links and streams are constantly popping up on the internet.[8] Appropriately, one industry insider has likened stopping livestream piracy to stopping the flow of water given that it “always finds a way” to leak out to the public.[9] However, broadcasters and European soccer leagues have not been dissuaded from attempting to manually block access to websites with illegal streams as they pop up. The Spanish soccer league (“LaLiga”) and Spanish broadcasters have sought, and obtained, judicial judgements granting them the right to unilaterally block access to websites that share illegal livestreams after they report the website to internet service providers that host the website in question.[10] Most recently, in 2022 several Spanish courts granted LaLiga and other rights-holders the ability to block websites with illegal streams, as new URLs, IP addresses, and internet domains with illegal streams are identified, through the 2024–25 LaLiga season.[11] These measures are similar to those originally implemented by the English Premier League when they blocked 210,000 illicit livestreams during the course of the 2018–19 season.[12]
However, these measures have not proven successful given that the number of visits to online piracy sites in the UK is still incredibly high with over 337 million visits to sports piracy websites in the UK alone between July 2020 and June 2021 according to anti-piracy firm MUSO.[13] The lack of success in manually blocking illegal livestreams has led 108 organizations, mainly made up of sports leagues, sports federations and sports broadcasters, to co-sign a formal letter to the European Commission urging them to adopt regulations that allow for the immediate elimination and suspension of websites that are shown to host illegal livestreams.[14] The European Commission’s response consisted of issuing a non-binding recommendation on piracy of live content in 2023 and will reportedly offer “a toolbox to fight the illegal streaming of live events, in particular sport events.”[15]
Given the rights-holders’ lack of success in using their domestic courts to obtain the right to take down illicit livestreams, and the current unwillingness by the European Union to pass binding regulations, it may be appropriate to begin considering alternative solutions. One solution, proposed by the founder and CEO of anti-piracy analytics firm White Bullet, could be to target the ad-generated revenue that online piracy websites earn, which can total around £1.4 million per year for the most visited online piracy websites in the UK alone.[16]
Regardless of which solution ultimately gets implemented, piracy is an issue that can shape one of the largest industries in the world, affect the way the world consumes sports, and the playing level on the field, thus making this an issue worth keeping an eye out on.
Footnotes
