The Illegal broadcasts of football matches on pirated websites continue to be a problem that Europe’s top leagues have to deal with. Spain’s LaLiga is currently working with a company to develop Artificial Intelligence tools capable of identifying these broadcasts in real time.
LaLiga estimates that these illegal broadcasts of matches in its championship — including Real Madrid and Barcelona games — generate annual losses of around 600 million euros. The value reflects not only the subscriptions that are no longer paid by football fans, but also the loss of value of official broadcasts.
Furthermore, a study by Grant Thornton, cited by the website TechRadar, points out that 10.8 million illegal broadcasts of live events were identified in 2024 alone, highlighting that 81% of them were never suspended. Even when they are detected quickly, only 2.7% of these transmissions are dropped within the first 30 minutes.
To address this issue, LaLiga is working with Fastly to develop Artificial Intelligence tools to identify these illegal broadcasts in real time, detecting specific signals rather than blocking large swaths of the network.
“At LaLiga, we were successful in reducing piracy of our broadcasts in Spain by 60% in the 2024/2025 season, through a complete, end-to-end strategy, focused on legal, educational, institutional and technological measures,” said LaLiga president, Javier Tebas. “This success is largely due to our ecosystem of partners, like Fastly, which has allowed us to continue exploring new and more effective ways to combat piracy at its source.”
Tebas also stated that this is ongoing work and that the league “remains committed to ending piracy”.
In turn, Fastly’s product manager, Kelly Shortridge, explained that the partnership with LaLiga focuses on reducing the time needed to identify illegal broadcasts of games.
“Unlike approaches based on regional lockdowns, our strategy focuses on accuracy, allowing fans to enjoy games while protecting content from misuse by criminals,” explained Shortridge. “At Fastly, we like to innovate in partnership with our customers and solve their most complex problems, and we are excited to continue working with LaLiga to help protect content owners around the world.”
Source: www.noticiasaominuto.com.br
