Much of the French football scene has been celebrating since Paris Saint-Germain's (PSG) Champions League triumph. This is also the case for the world of football piracy, which has been taking advantage of an illegal IPTV system for years to access paid matches. The phenomenon affects other sectors such as cinema and platforms broadcasting series, but it is sport that interests many fans of illegal Internet Protocol Television. Piracy of sports broadcasts is a major concern for rights holders who are trying to find solutions in the four corners of Europe, particularly in France, Belgium and Spain.
On the other side of the Pyrenees, the debate is raging and we are learning via the media Okdiario and El Economista that IPTV is in spectacular decline. Long presented as the undisputed king of illegal football broadcasting, this technique is beginning to be abandoned by pirates. The cause? The massive and often indiscriminate blocking orchestrated for months by LaLiga, the Spanish national professional football league. For many months, its president, Javier Tebas, has embarked on a fierce crusade against illegal streaming. But chase the pirate out the door, and he comes back through the social media window, posing colossal new challenges for rights holders.
Social media, the new playground for football pirates
For years, IPTV has been a mecca for football fans looking to bypass official subscriptions. But the tide has turned. The legal and technological offensive led by the authorities, and in particular the unwavering determination of LaLiga, has borne fruit, or at least made life considerably more complicated for pirate IPTV providers. Blockages are multiplying, networks are being dismantled, and access is becoming increasingly uncertain. We have even seen perfectly legitimate websites, having nothing to do with football, suffer the wrath of these large-scale blockages, collateral victims of a sometimes blind hunt.
Faced with this pressure, the ingenuity of pirates has turned to new strategies, more agile and significantly more difficult to counter. Gone are the days of complex infrastructures, replaced by the spontaneity of social networks. Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms are becoming the new playgrounds. The modus operandi is disconcertingly simple, since all you need is a smartphone and a social network account to live stream any content, including matches. The image is often clear, and the stream holds up... until the platform detects the violation, which can take a relatively long time.
Even a messaging service like Telegram can become a solution for watching football matches. In August 2024, to bypass DAZN in France, more than 200,000 people had watched the Le Havre-PSG match via Pavel Durov's app.
This new digital Wild West offers significant advantages for both illegal broadcasters and viewers. For the former, the barrier to entry is falling, and there's no longer a need for expensive servers or in-depth technical knowledge. An account, often anonymous, and a connection are all that's needed. Using VPNs to mask identity and location adds a layer of opacity that makes the task of anti-piracy sleuths significantly more difficult.
A simple new method that appeals
For the end user, access is via familiar platforms where they already spend a good portion of their time. It's often free, or perceived as such, and the spontaneity of these live streams makes tracking them down by rights holders particularly difficult. How can thousands of ephemeral streams, launched by individuals scattered across the globe, be effectively blocked? Javier Tebas and his teams, who had focused on blocking URLs and servers, find themselves facing a hydra whose heads are growing back on private applications, making their traditional direct blocking methods much less effective. The responsibility for filtering would then fall more on the platforms themselves, a challenge of a different magnitude.
Let's not forget the elephant in the room: the price of televised football. In a context where legal subscription prices have skyrocketed in recent years, many fans feel excluded and are turning, sometimes reluctantly, to these illicit alternatives to continue to cheer for their favorite teams.
This shift in piracy, moving from centralized systems to decentralized guerrilla warfare on social networks, marks a turning point. The fight against copyright infringement in sport is entering a new era, one that is much more complex for governing bodies to grasp. The spontaneity and apparent immunity offered by these new methods are likely to cause many headaches for rights holders. Far from being over, the battle is only changing its face.
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