There's a crackdown on sports piracy - but is it already out of control?

"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.

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. The agreement put live top-tier football behind a TV paywall for the first time.

It was a lucrative model, one that other leading championships in motorsport, rugby, golf and cricket would later seek to replicate.

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.

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 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 investments. To some extent, broadcasters used to see copyright theft as a cost of doing business: irritating and expensive, but not an existential threat. 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 end of TV sport's golden era?

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. Armed with bundles of TV cash, clubs have been able to attract the finest players in the world. That in turn has given the league a major international profile.

Although football has been the main beneficiary of paid-for TV in the UK, other competitions such as Formula One, Six Nations rugby and the Wimbledon tennis championships have also commanded very high fees for selling exclusive rights. Live sport on free-to-air television has become increasingly rare.

Yet that wealth could be threatened by a surge in piracy and illegal viewing. The practice is most common among younger, digital-native audiences, who each year become a larger and larger share of sports fans. But many older viewers also seem comfortable with it.

"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."

This year's Champions League final went behind a paywall in the UK for the first time in more than 30 years. Viewers were asked to pay at least £4.99 to watch it, prompting a backlash, including from the then-prime minister, Arsenal fan Sir Keir Starmer.

"Hardworking people shouldn't have to fork out for a subscription to watch this match," he wrote on X.

Many simply refused to pay: 3.7 million IP addresses accessed illegal streams of the match in the UK, according to research carried out by the Gaming Compliance International consultancy, on behalf of the Guardian newspaper. That compared to around seven million people who watched it legally in the UK.

One prolific user of pirate streams is "Kiran", a tech sector worker in his 30s, who prefers not to give his real name. A keen Arsenal fan, he likes to watch Premier League and Champions League games, as well as big matches in Spain's La Liga. He has a paid subscription to TNT Sports, but uses streaming websites to see games that are not available there.

"What it comes down to is the financial side - that's the big one - and ease of access as well," he says. "Getting every single game will cost you hundreds of pounds a year."

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 usually screened live in the UK, a decades-old policy designed to protect crowds at lower league matches. But broadcasters outside the UK can and do show those matches, fuelling pirated streams.

"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 as subscriptions got more expensive."

Fire sticks, illegal streams and VPNs

Those searching for pirated material have plenty of options. Streaming links, along with advice on how to avoid their pitfalls, are freely available in online discussion groups. These links, used by Kiran and his friends, have practical downsides – such as frequent buffering or poor quality, or platforms that disappear without warning. In some cases, they can also be used to bombard viewers with explicit ads for porn sites.

Many people prefer to access illegal content with a streaming device, such as an Amazon Fire Stick, a pocket-sized gadget that plugs into a TV. The sticks are legitimate products, but they can also be "sideloaded" with unauthorised software, allowing pirates to mimic the output of legitimate outlets by offering packages of selected channels.

A third option for illicit viewing is to use a virtual private network, or VPN, which effectively allows your computer to pretend it's in a different country, one in which access to sports programming is cheaper than it is in the UK (or totally free).

Earlier this year, the Sports Industry Group found that 58% of fans surveyed considered illegal streaming to be socially acceptable.

That may be because viewers have simply come to resent the amount of money they are expected to pay.

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".

A British person wanting to access all live Premier League games, for example, would need subscriptions to both Sky Sports and TNT Sports. Throw in some matches from Spain, or European Champions Cup rugby, and Premier Sports has to be added to the list. Many boxing matches and NFL games are on DAZN. A keen fan could easily end up paying £80 to £100 a month.

Until relatively recently, clamping down on piracy was not seen as a priority by the broadcasters themselves. They were focused on audience growth, and copyright infringement was simply a cost of doing business.

In some parts of the industry, it was even seen as a benefit. In 2013, the then-chief executive of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, notoriously welcomed the drama series Game of Thrones becoming the most pirated show in the world. He suggested that the attention generated by illegal viewing was "better than an Emmy" because it helped create buzz and ultimately attract new subscribers.

Now, however, the mood has shifted. Conventional broadcasting is under pressure as advertising revenues fall and viewers move away from long-term subscription services, towards more flexible offers from streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. Both Sky and TNT Sports have reported losses.

According to a recent report by WPI Economics, illegal sports streaming costs the broadcasting industry about £700m each year.

Threat to the grassroots

And piracy is already having impacts on the pitch.

At a conference last year, Tom Burrows, the head of global rights at the sports streaming platform DAZN, described piracy as a "huge problem" for his company, and "almost a crisis for the sports rights industry".

Just months after he made those comments, DAZN agreed to end its deal with the French football league, under which it was allowed to screen the top tier of French football matches within France. The agreement followed a bitter dispute, which focused in part on the streamer's claims the league had not done enough to combat piracy – although subscriber numbers were also understood to be an issue.

Even though DAZN paid a reported €100m (£85m) to end the contract (along with outstanding rights fees worth another €140m), its departure created a hole in the French league's finances. It was left to set up its own streaming service, and the amount of broadcast income fell from roughly €700m per year to €412m this season, according to figures compiled by football-finance.com.

For a European powerhouse like Paris St Germain, with plenty of other revenue sources, this probably matters little. But for smaller teams it has been a serious problem. Angers SCO, a club in the west of France, said last year the affair had cost it €30m over two seasons, and forced it to sell its striker Estéban Lepaul.

It's unlikely that a competition on the scale of the Premier League would lose its broadcaster. But piracy could ultimately limit how much they will be willing to pay in future.

"If you look at the finances of some of the broadcasters, they're losing money," says Kieran Maguire, associate professor of football finance at the University of Liverpool. "Piracy… is taking up a larger and larger share of the revenues that they would anticipate being able to generate through their subscription models. So yes, it is a worry for them."

Daniel Monaghan of Ampere 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".

If left unchecked, he thinks this will make it harder for rights holders to generate a return on their investments.

At best this could hamper future growth. At worst it could lead to falling revenues over time, hitting the sports that have benefitted most from the wave of TV money.

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.

Education vs punishment

So what can actually be done?

A key part of the solution, according to the industry-funded Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), is changing attitudes among consumers.

Nick Sumner, the organisation's investigations manager, insists piracy is not a victimless crime. "Organised crime is behind this, and they want to make money by any means possible," he explains.

It also leaves users at risk of fraud, he warns. "They capture… a lot of personal data, which they can then sell for criminal gain."

Broadcasters and sporting bodies have been working hard to shut off illegal online streams. Hundreds of thousands are taken down each year. But tackling them is, as Monaghan puts it, like whack-a-mole: "Some get taken down, others come up, often in different countries."

There is another option.

In the UK, downloading or streaming pirated content can be a crime. Yet the chances of viewers themselves being prosecuted for watching a cheeky Saturday game on a pirate stream are extremely low.

Nick Sumner of Fact says the current priority is to educate people about the risks of piracy - but he conspicuously stops short of ruling out a more punitive future policy.

"There are crimes being committed here," he says.

So it is possible that viewers of illicit material just might one day find themselves in expensive legal trouble.

However, the sheer scale of a major clampdown would present a formidable challenge, and could generate resentment. There would be no guarantees that those watching illegally today would take out legitimate subscriptions tomorrow.

Top image credit: Getty.

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