Spanish La Liga and Belgian Pro League Now Coordinate Against Piracy

• Spanish La Liga has decided to share its expertise and anti-piracy systems with Belgian Pro League.
• In return, Belgian Pro League is helping the Spaniards fight illicit content reproduction in Belgium and also invest money in the project.
• La Liga has managed to bring down thousands of pirating platforms and users during 2018 alone.

La Liga and Pro League, the two top tier football leagues in Spain and Belgium, will work together for the common cause of fighting piracy next season. This is actually coming as a renewal of their collaboration, as Pro League has already been using La Liga’s specialized and sophisticated anti-piracy resources. In return, Pro League is blocking piracy that associates with the Spanish football league in Belgium and also contributes in the investment for the development of newer and even more effective piracy blocking systems. IPTV providers who specialize in football/soccer are everywhere, so it looks like their tackling requires such international collaborations after all.

We have repeatedly reported about how much La Liga cares about protecting their content from IPTV pirates, and we recently saw how they went to the point of eavesdropping through their official smartphone app to locate unlawful re-transmissions of Spanish football matches. While La Liga denied that they were spying on people claiming that this is nowhere near to how their app works from a technical perspective, they still got a hefty €250k fine imposed by the AEPD (Spanish Data Protection Agency).

To make a demonstration of their power to locate pirates and bash them, La Liga announced the results of their recent efforts on this front. In 2018, they reported 268,000 unlicensed videos showing football footage on social media. All of these, as well as the 9,000 accounts that uploaded this content have been removed/blocked. Moreover, they claim to have disabled 10,000 card-sharing servers, reported 703 fraudulent or copyright-infringing apps relating to football streaming and available on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, and finally also removed 6,000 links from the Google Search Index. Clearly, La Liga has been very busy fighting piracy, and this is not just some form of a non-based persistence from their account.

La Liga is one of, if not the, most spectacular football leagues in Europe, so they have to go to great lengths to protect their precious product, otherwise broadcasters won’t pay the millions they do in order to win the exclusive rights to this content. That is exactly why another highly-valuable league, The Premier League in the UK, is similarly battering when it comes to dealing with pirates, organizing Police raids and pushing judges to impose prison sentences. The Belgian Pro League is not in the same league as the other two, but still, piracy is undermining its value and those in charge are doing something to stop it.

Do you think we’ll soon have a European coalition of football leagues, sharing their technological means and financial resources to deliver a total blow on IPTV sports piracy? Let us know what you think in the comments below, and don't forget to follow us via our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.