It’s high time that sport started having adult conversations about piracy. Does it really cost the industry almost $30bn a year? Or is it just the cost of doing business as an expensive subscription product? SVG Europe editor-at-large Callum McCarthy finds out.
Javier Tebas has spent much of the past two years obsessing over the damage done to his league by piracy. 
The LaLiga president, now in his fourth term, has gone after some of the biggest companies in tech to try and snuff out illegal streaming at the source, gaining court orders to shut down swathes of the internet every time a match is broadcast live.
Tebas has even reportedly infiltrated private chats on encrypted messaging service Telegram in an attempt to bring down pirate networks. He is nothing if not determined.
This one-man crusade has been motivated by a belief that piracy costs LaLiga about €650m each year. If that number is even close to the truth, it would make piracy the primary reason for LaLiga’s lack of commercial growth over the past five years.
Tebas has never publicly explained how he sourced that number, but it isn’t rare to see the sports industry apply zero-sum logic to piracy.
Reports such as this one from Synamedia and Ampere Analysis suggest that the global sports industry is missing out on $28bn a year in revenue due to its inadequate response to illegal streaming. Apparently, all of this revenue would be up for grabs if pirates were given a lower-cost, legal alternative to watch all the sport they could want.
This $28bn figure is, of course, questionable. That aside, the report is definitely right about one thing: lower prices, simpler packaging and more convenient delivery is the tried-and-tested playbook for killing piracy overnight.
The launch of Spotify in 2009 proved that it works. The Sweden-based tech company turned the music business upside down with a model that even the most ardent pirate couldn’t resist: a comprehensive product with a bargain-bin price.
At 9.99 of your chosen currency each month, Spotify gave pirates the content they craved without any of the time spent searching and downloading it. The economics were inarguable.
The success of this model gave other industries a blueprint to follow. Netflix all but killed film and TV torrenting in the space of a few years. Steam and Xbox Game Pass have reduced video game piracy to a niche concern.
Live sport is now the last remaining media business to be afflicted by mass-scale piracy. And for all the huffing, puffing, complaining and group chat infiltration, perhaps people like Javier Tebas actually prefer it that way.
Be careful what you wish for
Piracy crackdowns scratch an itch for Tebas, but he is clever enough to know what works and what doesn’t. Crackdowns didn’t work in music and film, and they aren’t working for sport.
The closure of prominent online streaming site StreamEast was hailed by the industry as a major blow against piracy. Amid the celebrations, word had already spread about reliable sites ready to take StreamEast’s place, including FreeStreamsLive and Fawanews.
The truth is that sport has no interest in changing its distribution model, and thus no interest in curing its piracy problem. Why? Because the side effects look a lot worse than the disease.
Media disruption is a messy, stressful, expensive game. Spotify may have saved the music business from the clutches of peer-to-peer downloading but it also destroyed what was left of the music sales business, forcing labels and artists to focus on touring and merchandise to make up for the losses. Music said yes to the model because it was desperate, not because it wanted to.
As for Spotify itself, it lost over $3bn from 2009 to 2023, turning its first profit in 2024.
Sport is no stranger to the Spotify model. Ten years ago, DAZN’s original pitch was to replicate it, making sport a €9.99 a month proposition with rights payments spread across minimum guarantees and viewership-based royalty payments.
Spotify made this pitch to the music business when it was at its lowest ebb. DAZN, on the other hand, made its pitch to the sports industry in 2015 – one of the biggest growth years ever recorded for media rights revenue.
Instead of bringing the aggregator model to sport, DAZN was forced to join the queue of telcos, broadcasters and streamers willing to pay too much for sport. By the end of 2024, DAZN had chewed through $7bn of investor money. It’ll chew through plenty more in 2025.
For as long as global sport can keep raking in about $60bn each year from media rights guarantees, the high-cost, high-piracy subscription model will be working exactly as intended.
Less like music, more like software
Lowering prices and aggregating content works in severely distressed industries, but sport is a long way from desperation.
It has free-to-air and sponsorship-funded models to fall back on before accepting that fate, and also has protection against a hostile takeover from big tech in the form of local competition laws, broadcast regulations and ‘crown jewel’ lists that mandate free-to-air distribution.
For these reasons, sport has been able to reject the path taken by other media businesses, but it isn’t alone in sticking out the high-cost, high-piracy model.
Software companies such as Microsoft and Adobe are the biggest victims of piracy in any global business, with Adobe’s Photoshop editing software thought to be the single most-pirated product of all by volume and zero-sum revenue lost.
Regardless, Adobe’s has kept its Creative Cloud subscription bundle at around $80 a month – similar to the cost of a premium sports and entertainment bundle in the UK, Europe or the US. If you want Photoshop alone, that’ll cost around $30 a month – similar to a standalone sports subscription. Adobe and Microsoft continue to grow their revenues quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year. Piracy isn’t killing their business – it’s just an annoying byproduct of their model.
These kinds of high-cost subscription products rely on millions of individual and business customers that value quality, convenience and reliability more than the money they could save by going illegal. And for as long as enough people are included in that bracket, Adobe, Microsoft and the global sports industry won’t change a thing.
So please: no more fake tough talk about crackdowns and prohibition. No more asinine claims about how tens of billions are lost each year. No more yelling at Cloudflare.
Piracy is just the cost of doing business.
At FutureSPORT 2025, sponsored by TATA Communications Media, SVG Europe will host a workshop focused on anti-piracy and content protection in sport. The event is taking place at the Amex Stadium in Brighton on 6 November. Find out more: https://www.svgeurope.org/future-sport-2025/programme/
