There’s a crackdown on sports piracy — but has it already spiralled out of control?

“Football’s Gone Round the Spend!” shouted The People newspaper one Sunday in July 1995. It reported excitedly that three clubs together were preparing to spend more than £20m on new players.

The standout deal that summer was Stan Collymore’s move from Nottingham Forest to Liverpool for a British record £8.5m.

That figure may not sound especially striking now, in an era when £100m transfers are almost routine. But back then it was a huge moment, and it marked football’s transformation from sport into big business.

All of this had been enabled in the early 1990s by the launch of the Premier League and its first TV agreement with Sky, which paid more than £300m for five years of rights. For the first time, live top-flight football was placed behind a TV paywall.

It was a highly profitable model, and one that other major competitions in motorsport, rugby, golf and cricket would later try to copy.

Now, though, that model is under strain. Piracy has become widespread in British sport: about half of sports fans now admit to using what they might politely call “alternative” ways to watch paywalled content, according to consultancy Ampere Analysis.

This year’s Champions League final — won by Paris Saint-Germain — triggered a debate about TV viewing rights.

And this summer brought signs of a tougher response.

In August, a man in Lancashire was jailed for six and a half years for operating an illegal streaming service that police said had produced almost £1m in unlawful profits. In June, a postman from Pembrokeshire was jailed for more than three years for selling illegal subscriptions and providing pirate software to nearly 2,000 people.

A third man, from Merseyside, was given a suspended 32-month sentence in August for similar crimes. Several pubs have also been fined thousands of pounds for showing matches illegally.

TV companies that have paid enormous sums for exclusive rights to major sports are having to fight harder than ever to defend their investments. Broadcasters once tended to view copyright theft as part of the cost of doing business: annoying and expensive, but not a threat to their survival. But now, as advertising income declines and viewers drift away from long-term subscription services such as Sky or TNT Sports, the industry is becoming seriously alarmed.

A great deal is at stake. The Premier League alone is a sporting giant. In its latest deal, it sold domestic viewing rights for £6.7bn over four years, with almost the same amount coming from overseas rights. With all that TV money, clubs have been able to sign the world’s best players. That has, in turn, given the league a huge global profile.

Although football has been the main winner from paid 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 exclusive rights. Live sport on free-to-air television has become increasingly uncommon.

Yet that wealth may be threatened by a rise in piracy and illegal viewing. The practice is most common among younger, digitally native audiences, who each year make up a bigger share of sports fans. But many older viewers also appear 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 was 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 criticism, 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 declined to pay: 3.7 million IP addresses accessed illegal streams of the match in the UK, according to research by Gaming Compliance International for the Guardian newspaper. That compared with around seven million people who watched it legally in the UK.

One frequent user of pirate streams is “Kiran”, a tech worker in his 30s who does not want to use his real name. A devoted Arsenal supporter, he likes to watch Premier League and Champions League matches, as well as major games in Spain’s La Liga. He has a paid TNT Sports subscription, but uses streaming sites to watch games that are not shown 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.”

The streams he uses are free, and links are easy to find on social media.

But he says there is another factor: the famous blackout. Matches played between 14:45 and 17:15 on a Saturday are usually not shown live in the UK, a long-standing rule intended to protect attendances at lower-league games. Broadcasters outside the UK, however, can and do show those matches, which helps fuel 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.”

People looking for pirated content have many choices. Streaming links, along with tips on how to avoid their problems, are freely shared in online discussion groups. These links, used by Kiran and his friends, have practical drawbacks — including constant buffering, poor picture quality, or platforms that vanish without warning. In some cases, they can also bombard viewers with explicit ads for porn sites.

Many users prefer to watch illegal content on a streaming device such as an Amazon Fire Stick, a small gadget that plugs into a TV. The sticks are legitimate products, but they can also be “sideloaded” with unauthorised software, enabling pirates to imitate legitimate services by offering bundles of selected channels.

A third way to access illicit viewing is through a virtual private network, or VPN, which effectively makes your computer appear to be in another country, where sports programming is cheaper than in the UK — or completely free.

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

That may be because viewers have grown resentful of how much 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”.

For example, a British viewer wanting to watch all live Premier League matches would need subscriptions to both Sky Sports and TNT Sports. Add in some Spanish matches or European Champions Cup rugby, and Premier Sports must also be included. Many boxing bouts and NFL games are on DAZN. A keen fan could easily end up paying £80 to £100 a month.

Until fairly recently, broadcasters themselves did not see piracy enforcement as a priority. They were focused on growing audiences, and copyright infringement was simply another cost of doing business.

In some parts of the industry, it was even viewed as helpful. In 2013, Jeff Bewkes, then chief executive of Time Warner, famously welcomed Game of Thrones becoming the most pirated show in the world. He said the attention created by illegal viewing was “better than an Emmy” because it helped generate buzz and eventually attract new subscribers.

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

A recent report by WPI Economics says illegal sports streaming costs the broadcasting industry about £700m a year.

And piracy is already affecting the game itself.

At a conference last year, Tom Burrows, head of global rights at 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 those remarks, DAZN agreed to end its deal with the French football league, under which it had been allowed to show the top tier of French football matches in France. The agreement came after a bitter dispute, which partly centred on the streamer’s claim that the league had not done enough to fight piracy — although subscriber numbers were also understood to be a factor.

Even though DAZN reportedly paid €100m (£85m) to terminate the contract, along with outstanding rights fees worth another €140m, its exit left a gap in the French league’s finances. The league had to launch its own streaming service, and broadcast income fell from about €700m a year to €412m this season, according to figures compiled by football-finance.com.

For a European giant like Paris St Germain, with plenty of other income streams, this probably matters little. But for smaller clubs it has been a serious issue. Angers SCO, a club in western France, said last year the situation had cost it €30m over two seasons and forced it to sell striker Estéban Lepaul.

It is unlikely that a competition on the scale of the Premier League would lose its broadcaster. But piracy could eventually reduce how much broadcasters are 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 believes 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 it is left unchecked, he says, it will make it harder for rights holders to earn a return on their investments.

At best, that could slow future growth. At worst, it could mean falling revenues over time, hurting the sports that have benefited most from the surge in TV money.

For the Premier League, that might simply mean fewer headline-grabbing transfers — but it could also cut the amount the league distributes to the wider game, from grassroots level upwards, which totalled £1.6bn over the three years to 2025.

So what can actually be done?

A key part of the answer, according to the industry-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), is changing consumer attitudes.

Nick Sumner, the organisation’s investigations manager, says piracy is not a victimless crime. “Organised crime is behind this, and they want to make money by any means possible,” he says.

He also warns that users are exposed to fraud. “They capture… a lot of personal data, which they can then sell for criminal gain.”

Broadcasters and sports bodies have been working hard to shut down illegal online streams. Hundreds of thousands are removed every year. But, as Monaghan puts it, dealing with them is like whack-a-mole: “Some get taken down, others come up, often in different countries.”

There is another route.

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

Nick Sumner of Fact says the current focus is on educating people about the risks of piracy — but he pointedly does not rule out a tougher future policy.

“There are crimes being committed here,” he says.

So it is possible that people watching illegal content could one day find themselves in costly legal trouble.

Even so, the sheer scale of a major crackdown would be a formidable challenge, and could provoke resentment. There would be no guarantee that those who watch illegally today would switch to legitimate subscriptions tomorrow.