If there is a battle that La Liga has decided to take on in recent years, it is pirate streaming of games. President Javier Tebas has called it the biggest threat to the game, and the current model of subsistence, but La Liga have received negative news with regard to their battle.

Tebas has before declared that he spends around 60% of his time on pirate streaming and trying to combat it. La Liga have recently declared several victories, contributing to arrests of several major illegal streaming outlets in Argentina and in Spain. However their main battle lies with search engine providers and servers such as Cloudflare, who are refusing to give up the identity of their users. La Liga are involved in a weighty legal debate on the matter.

Report claims rise in illegal sports streaming in Spain

Despite those successes above, it appears their efforts have thus far been somewhat in vain. According to a report from Grant Thornton, via Cadena SER, pirate streaming is on the rise. In 2024, 10.8 million notifications of unauthorised streaming of live events. However in the first six months of 2025 alone, that figure has been 15.4m, an increase of 142% over that period.

Only in 11% of the 26.2 million total cases between the start of 2024 and June 2025 did La Liga manage to suspend the live transmissions. That figure was at 19% in the second half of 2024, but fell to just 5% in 2025. Only 5% of those transmissions were addressed within 30 minutes, and 21% took more than two hours – by which time any La Liga game would be finished. That said, La Liga claim they have reduced pirate streaming by 60% within Spain during the 2024-25 season.

The pricing debate

Many within Spain have pointed out that watching La Liga is more expensive than watching the Premier League, Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and Liga NOS, despite Spain having a far lower average income than any of these countries, as a major contributing factor. This argument has been dismissed by Tebas, who maintains that the options in place in Spain, which requires a minimum deal of over €1k per season, works out as cheap.

The debate spiked last year, when Real Madrid’s Vinicius Junior seemingly posted a screenshot from a pirate stream, although this was vehemently denied by his club.