Sports piracy explodes in UK with 3.6bn illegal streams and rise of black-market bookmakers
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jan/15/sports-piracy-explodes-uk-illegal-streams-black-market-bookmakers?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Posted by wappingite
44 Comments
The problem with music piracy was almost 100% solved with first very slick ways to buy and own
digital music – iTunes, and then music streaming with Spotify and other services.
Sure Spotify and Apple make a lot of money and squeezed the producers, but everyone accepted that they would be getting less, and the prize was almost totally eliminating piracy – for the majority it’s just not worth bothering getting hold of illegal music as the legal services are far too convenient and well priced.
Sports streaming is expensive, the services themselves are geo-locked and clunky, prices go up every year. If your sport is niche it might barely get coverage or will be way overpriced or you end up googling relentless at the end of every season to find out who has the rights next. And if you’re following a premier league team you need multiple subscriptions to watch the games (and not even get all of them yet).
The piracy is caused by the sports industry’s own greed.
Come up with a reasonably priced slick service without silly restrictions and people will flock to it.
And just look at this:
>The report argues that sports streaming is being deliberately used to take illegal gambling into the mainstream, having been developed initially to target heavy loss-making punters and vulnerable individuals excluded by the regulated industry.
>“Unlicensed gambling is by far the largest and most prevalent ‘media partner’ to the criminal business of illegal streaming of sports events,” said Ismail Vali, founder of Yield Sec.
First they tried to link movie piracy with FUNDING TERRORISM as if downloading a torrent of a movie gives cash to Islamic Jihad.
That didn’t work as it was ridiculous, now it’s ‘if you watch an illegal sports stream you will be DRAWN IN to ILLEGAL GAMBLING as a VULNERABLE PERSON’.
Which is also ridiculous.
Why can’t they be honest and say they’re anoyed they’re missing out on subscriptions?
“As streaming rights for sports are spread across more platforms, making it harder and harder to legally view all your teams matches in one place, fans are finding one place to view all their teams matches regardless”
I just gave up watching football all together. So expensive with multiple subscriptions and can’t even watch my team every week.
I don’t think this needs a retrospective as to why this is the case. We all know why.
Good luck policing it. The streaming sites and IPTV keep getting better and better while the sports broadcasters get more and more expensive and the games get spread between more and more services.
The stats against the US are fascinating. The difference between UK sport and the US? All the major sports in the US have a fairly affordable official streaming service that lets you watch any and every game you want, costing £18/month or £170 for a year. In the UK, we still have the archaic and daft as shite 3pm game rules, you can’t watch every game, games are split between 3-4 services and it costs roughly £100/month for all of them.
Bonkers.
Yeh, basically everyone I know has got a dodgy stick. As if anyone even if they can afford to is paying for all these streaming services. Taking the piss if they think people are forking out for that.
Would it be good if the BBC had a monopoly on such sports? At least that would fix fragmentation.
The thing people miss when comparing football with music or TV streaming is that in the UK you can subscribe to every sports streaming service paying £100s a month
And you still can’t watch your team!!!!!!
The 3pm blackout needs to be reviewed, it simply doesn’t work for UK audiences
In India, a legal stream of Disney+ Hotstar ( now called Jio Hotstar) which has ALL THE SPORTS IN 4K, costs about £10 A YEAR! Here they expect you to pay £30-50 a month.
Piracy will stop for most when the alternative is an easy and fair priced solution.
Just look at the music industry.
If sky didn’t get so greedy and made their prices so inflated, there wouldn’t be a need to download illegal streams! Deserves them right! 🤣
It’s almost like not being able to watch every game and being charged a fortune to watch barely any games is a bad system.
Make a fair system that’s doesn’t exploit people that’s a fair price and shows ALL games and it will go away.
People will turn to this stuff when companies take the piss.
Remember when Sky sports had the monopoly.. it was £20 a month..
Now it’s
Skysports
TNT
Amazon
Whatever else.
They said it would create competition and increase accessibility..
Stop overcharging and fewer people will pirate it.
The media companies have made their own beds.
If I need 3 different subscriptions just to watch rugby, you can fuck right off.
Look what happened with music, unfortunately people are going to keep doing this and until an AFFORDABLE alternative is offered it will continue to happen.
The writing is on the wall, only a matter of time before a ‘Premflix’ style option is offered.
Dont follow the football but i do follow boxing and ufc i did sometimes used to stream years ago however the pop ups and frozen streams were just too much dazn have came out with a 22.99/month subscription with PPV included so i started a contract with then as its a fair price and isnt actually that greedy for what you get if others followed suit i gaurentee everybody would just pay a subscription for convienence if not anything else
The only way prices will come down is if a major provider like Sky Sports goes bust and clubs need to reorganize financially.
The biggest expense in football is salary and there is no club or league brave enough to reduce salary expenditure for a fairer price for fans.
I don’t pirate sports streams, I can understand why people do it. Watching sports live is inordinately expensive in the UK, even just to do so from home. The main sport I follow is F1 and to watch that through official avenues your paying £300 to £450 in the UK. Just that raw number is absurdly high.
Meanwhile in the US they have a service called F1 TV Premium which is $89.99 annually. I believe Apple will soon get the rights to F1 in the US so their cost will rise to an Apple TV subscription ($99 annually). This only goes to make the UK cost insane by comparison, for arguably a worse service. No wonder people don’t want to pay.
Pandora’s Box has been well and truly opened with regards to illegal streaming of all sorts, and there’s nothing they can do about it, it would seem.
Pisses me off when I pay for sky sports and go to watch a game but no…it’s on TNT and I have to pay another £30 a month
TNT took away EuroSport and made cycling way too expensive to watch
One of the catalysts here is all the reporting. Every day there’s some new article about raids on suppliers of “dodgy” Firesticks providing free Sky Sports, Netflix etc. No one reads those articles and thinks “oh gosh, this is important news”. They just think “damn, how can I get one of those?” and then a few Googles later, they’re up and running.
It’s cheaper to have a VPN + dedicated IP + foreign subscription than pay Sky/TNT/Prime…
I pay for Sky, TNT, Amazon etc. I also have a real life season ticket for the football club I support. However, I use IPTV to watch 3pm away games. I don’t have enough loyalty points to ever get tickets (although I do enter ballots) so that is literally the only way I can watch my team play away at 3pm.
If you think of your team playing away at Fulham, for example, at 3pm – only a maximum of 3,000 people who support your team can legally watch that game, by attending. That is bonkers.
Imagine how much money they could all make if they made the price of these subscriptions anything close to reasonable.
Piracy fell off a cliff when the streaming age began because it was affordable to watch TV. Now that everyone has their own streaming platform and costs are well above what an old cable/Sky subscription cost, piracy is back with a vengeance.
I wonder why that could be …..hmmmmm
The greed from governing bodies and clubs which then pushes streaming platforms to pay more and the fragmentation of each sports on multiple platforms will not stop the illegal stream.
This is exactly what’s happening with video streaming, the fragmentation means you have to choose one streaming platform if any at all.
I get appletv free through my bank and that’s it’s no Netflix, Disney+ etc
When steam came I stopped pirating games. When spotify came i stopped pirating music.
When netflix came i stopped pirating movies/shows.
Never stopped pirating sports because there was never a convenient and fairly prices solution.
Netflix also fked up because they got greedy so I cancelled and went back to dark seas.
Give me fair service and I will gladly pay it.
They can afford it and plan for the loss in budgets. Sod em.
I would happily pay F1 TV to watch F1. I will never pay for sky. Instead, I just don’t watch it. Or watch highlights on C4. Most pubs don’t show it.
It’s crazy that the UK doesn’t reward its on citizens for having the best football league in the world, in fact it actively fights against them to extort them for every penny they can, whilst giving other countries absurdly cheap or free coverage.
This is a symptom of greed. Piracy will significantly drop if you can provide the service for £20 a month.
Give us a cheap Netflix of sport, tenner a month and everyone will just use that and not bother with illegal stuff. Instead they want us to pay 120 a month for sky sports let alone premier, amazon and whatever else they show games on.
Its because streaming companies charge so much. Why pay £100+ a year when you can get something for £30, for example? The only reason they are bothered by it is because they are losing money.
Its the same with people buying tobacco abroad and selling it in the UK selling the government are happy for them to have it for themselves but as soon as people start selling it the government claim the money goes to criminal gangs. The real reason the government dont want it happening is because they lose out on money. If it was more dangerous than UK tobacco then why would the government allow people to bring any in?
I could have sky, tnt, prime, and still not be able to watch all the football games for one team 💀 thats ONE TEAM IN ONE SPORT. How can anyone be surprised ppl pirate streams lmao i mean seriously
Just make a FootballTV channel that shows every single game for like £50 month and people would pay it straight away… None of this 3pm blackout bullshit and paying for 5 different services just to watch your team across multiple competitions.
If i could stream all my own teams games for a tenner a month I’d gladly pay it. But instead i would have to pay many times that to only see some of the games. So i dont pay any of them. Fuck em
Who is even annoyed about this, every party connected to the industry is making tonnes of money whether it be the players or the streaming services or the prem itself. The reason you can get streams of 3pm games is because there is a market for selling them to the whole globe, that says it all.
“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem” – Gabe Newell, 2011
It really doesn’t help when you now have the rights for certain things being spread across multiple platforms.
I’m a big Bundesliga fan and for the last 4 years I could watch the 4/5 matches a week that were available to the U.K. audience all on Sky.
This season the rights have been broken up. One game on Friday night does now go out FTA on the BBC and YouTube which is nice. However, Sky still retain the Saturday evening game and the Sunday afternoon matches which were all on Sky before are now only available through Amazon at an additional cost of £2.50 per game.
I think something similar happened with La Liga. Previously it was all available through La Liga TV but this season Disney Plus have secured exclusive rights to the Saturday night matches, so an additional subscription is now required.
Imagine a apple subscription with decently priced sports & add ons
In Romania we pay 10 euros for cable and high speed internet, all top football 5 leagues in Europe are included . Over 100 channels.
The company still reported 1.4 billions in revenue
Sky – Premier League, League Cup
TNT – Premier League, F.A Cup, Champions League, Europa League
Amazon Prime – Premier League, Champions League
Terrestrial (T.V License) – F.A Cup, Carabao Cup
Four different places to watch 5 different competitions featuring English top flight teams. Over the course of a year to watch have access to all the televised matches on these platforms equals approximately £1,200.00.
And what’s best, you still don’t get to watch all the games. You don’t even get to choose which games you want to watch. You only get to watch the games that are hand picked for TV. So if you’re a fan of a club with a traditionally smaller fan base, then unlucky…
£1,200.00 per year to watch a portion of your teams fixtures which you have absolutely zero input in choosing. Wow, what a deal…
But you could just get a season ticket for that price and watch all the games! Or the home ones at least. Well, no I can’t. First of all there’s a waiting list for season tickets for the team I support. And I used to have a season ticket, but the price went up by about £300.00 – £400.00 from one season to the next, so I couldn’t afford. That’s not accounting for travel costs. And I can’t give an accurate cost of the increase, because the club introduced an automatic cup scheme, which meant that you automatically buy tickets for cup games regardless as to whether you actually want to attend. The price of which increased the further the team progressed through the tournament. So you actually have frig all idea as to what your season ticket would cost over the course of the season. Oh, and there’s the fact that the fixture times and dates are constantly moved about, mainly for TV. So as someone who is at work for 5am, any evening games from Sunday to Thursday are not doable. But I guess I can sell my ticket through the clubs official channel for face value, which they’ll then repackage into a tourist trap package with a nice £250.00 price tag…
It’s madness. And it’s infuriating to see the blame being laid everywhere else other than the high cost for what is effectively a piss poor service stretched across overpriced subscription platforms.
Football fans in the UK are essentially subsidising the research and marketing for institutions like the Premier League to spread their product around the world. And we’re getting a worse service at a higher price as a result.
But yeah, sure. Illegal gambling is the real issue in all of this…
idc
there are literally ~7.5 billion more important things than ensuring already filthy rich people get more money
and if I could just pay for one service, even if it was a bit pricy, I’d do it. I’ve been saying for years that governments should strike a deal with streaming services to get a unified service, that’ll do more to destroy piracy than taking down the pirate bay did. I’d pay £100 a month for ONE service that let’s me watch literally everything without worrying (I don’t watch sports, if they want to split that single service into tiers so people who don’t care about sports can pay less then they can, but keep it as one service where you just select and deselect categories in a quick and easy way and UNDERSTANBLE/expectable, no nasty surprises that a show you’d expect to have available isn’t under your plan).
Before you say how much money they’d lose: I pay nothing atm, literally nothing, not even youtube or crunchyroll despite several hours of content I watch a day being on those sites.
A friend of mine(!) pays a lot of money to legally access all the legit places to watch football in the UK – Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Amazon Prime and Netflix. And even with that outlay he(!) still can only watch like 20% of actual games. Meanwhile people abroad pay something like 70% less and can access every single games. Is it any wonder said friend has an IPTV sub on the side too?
It’s either subscribe to 3-4 different platforms costing hundreds a month or spend 2 minutes looking up a stream. It’s a no brainer. Like why can’t I watch Celtic matches on CelticTV in the UK? Outside the UK get every game in full. It’s so dumb that it benefits people abroad more than the locals and we’re priced out.