“Football’s Gone Round the Spend!” screamed The People newspaper one Sunday in July 1995. It reported breathlessly that three clubs between them were set to pay out more than £20m on new players. The highlight that summer was the transfer of Stan Collymore from Nottingham Forest to Liverpool for a British record fee of £8.5m. That number might not seem too impressive today, in an age when £100m transfers are almost commonplace. But at the time it was seismic stuff, and it symbolised the conversion of football from sport into big business. Clubs have been able to attract the finest players in the world, armed with bundles of TV cash. But for smaller teams it has been a serious problem.
All of this had been made possible in the early 1990s by the creation of the Premier League, and its initial TV deal with the broadcaster Sky, which paid more than £300m for five years of rights. It was a lucrative model, one that other leading championships in motorsport, rugby, golf and cricket would later emulate. Rupert Murdoch launched Sky TV with the broadcaster Andrew Neil in 1989. It went on to transform Britain’s sports-watching landscape. According to even though DAZN paid a, ¬100m (£85m) to end the contract (along with outstanding rights fees worth another â¬140m), its departure created a hole in the French league’s finances.
But now, that model is coming under pressure. Piracy has become endemic in British sports: around half of sports fans now admit to using what they might euphemistically call “alternative” means to watch paywalled material, according to the consultancy Ampere Analysis. This year’s Champions League final – won by Paris Saint-Germain – sparked an argument about TV viewing rights. It went behind a paywall in the UK for the first time in more than 30 years. Many simply refused to pay: 3.7 million IP addresses accessed illegal streams of the match in the UK. Prompting a backlash, including from the then-prime minister, Arsenal fan Sir Keir Starmer, viewers were asked to pay at least £4.99 to watch it. Those searching for pirated material have plenty of options. They can also be used to bombard viewers with explicit ads for porn sites, in some cases. But they can also be “sideloaded” with unauthorised software, allowing pirates to mimic the output of legitimate outlets by offering packages of selected channels, the sticks are legitimate products. That may be because viewers have simply come to resent the amount of money they are expected to pay. A keen fan could easily end up paying £80 to £100 a month. And the amount of broadcast income fell from roughly â¬700m per year to â¬412m this season, according to figures compiled by football-finance.com, it was left to set up its own streaming service. However, the mood has shifted. With plenty of other revenue sources, this probably matters little, for a European powerhouse like Paris St Germain.
The Crackdown
And this summer saw signs of a clampdown. In August, a man in Lancashire was jailed for six and a half years for running an illegal streaming service that police said had generated almost £1m in illicit profits. In June, a postman from Pembrokeshire was jailed for over three years for selling illegal subscriptions and supplying pirate software to nearly 2,000 people. A third man, from Merseyside, received a suspended 32-month sentence in August for similar offences. Several pubs were also raided. Several pubs have been fined thousands of pounds for screening matches illegally.
TV companies that have paid huge sums for exclusive rights to high-profile sports are having to work harder than ever to protect their investment. There is a great deal at stake. The Premier League alone is a sporting monster. In its most recent deal, it sold its viewing rights to domestic audiences for £6.7bn over four years, with almost as much coming from foreign rights. Yet that wealth could be threatened by a surge in piracy. That in turn has given the league a major international profile. And piracy is already having impacts on the pitch.
Demographics and Motivation
The practice is most common among younger generations. “For 18 to 34-year-olds, it’s over 70% who admit to doing this regularly,” says Daniel Monaghan, a researcher at Ampere Analysis. “Over half of 35 to 44s admit to doing it, and about a third of those aged 45 to 64.
Monaghan thinks piracy is at the very least a significant constraint on the sports rights models that have been highly lucrative for broadcasters and rights holders over the last 30 years. Clamping down on piracy was not seen as a priority by the broadcasters themselves, until relatively recently.
In the case of the Premier League, this might just mean fewer blockbuster transfers – but it could also reduce the sum the League gives to the wider football game, from grassroots upwards, which amounted to £1.6bn over the three years to 2025.
One prolific user of pirate streams is “Kiran”, a tech sector worker in his 30s. “What it comes down to is the financial side – that’s the big one – and ease of access as well,” he says. “Getting access to all the games legally often involves multiple subscriptions, which is very expensive. These links, used by Kiran and his friends, have practical downsides â such as frequent buffering or poor quality, or platforms that disappear without warning.
Meanwhile the streams he uses are free, with links readily obtainable on social media.
But there’s another issue, he says: the famous blackout. Games taking place between 14:45 and 17:15 on a Saturday are not broadcast on live TV in the UK. “I pretty much got into streaming stuff due to the blackout,” Kiran says, “and I’d say I sort of did it a bit more regularly after that.”
Methods of Access
- Many people prefer to access illegal content with a streaming device, such as an Amazon Fire Stick, a pocket-sized computer that plugs into a TV’s HDMI port.
- A third option for illicit viewing is to use a virtual private network, or VPN, which effectively allows your computer to appear as if it is based in another country.
- Streaming links, along with advice on how to avoid their detection, are shared openly on platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram.
But tackling them is, as Monaghan puts it, like whack-a-mole: “Some get taken down, others come up, often in different countries.” As the industry continues its legal battle against illegal streaming, the challenge remains balancing the high-cost subscription model with the accessibility demands of a modern, tech-savvy audience that increasingly views the traditional paywall as a hurdle to be jumped rather than a fee to be paid. But now, as advertising revenues fall, and viewers move away from long-term subscription services like Sky or TNT Sports, the industry is getting seriously worried. The Sports Industry Group found that 58% of fans surveyed considered illegal streaming to be socially acceptable, earlier this year. As the government’s Intellectual Property Office puts it, “a main driver of illegal content access is the perception of unfair or high pricing for legal services”.
