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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

In Italy something similar is happening: they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly (that's very high for our economy). To this, add the facts that there has been a major hit to illegal streaming piracy and that football games are getting extremely boring in our country (compared to the Premier League or our Serie A of twenty years ago). The major effect of this is that newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football, much less than their parents and grandparents. These people are trying to milk a cow that will be dry in less than 5 years, unless a major revolution happens in FIGC (Italian Football Federation).

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> they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly

Same in Germany.

> newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football

Also the same in Germany.

But I am not sure which direction the causality goes. Maybe people are less interested in football because of the shenanigans they are constantly pulling. Or maybe they try to squeeze the remaining audience because people are less interested. It may also not be related at all.

>>Also the same in Germany.

Just because you want something to be true to make your argument...doesn't make it true.

Growth for memberships over the last few years are pretty strong especially in the under 16 age group with 9% yoy.[1]

Attendance is also on a steady upwards trend.[2]

The last EM also had new highs in viewership linear and streaming. As overall the non-linear media surrounding football is growing...[3]

[1] https://www.dfb.de/news/dfb-mitgliederstatistik-mehr-schiris...

[2] https://twocircles.com/gb/articles/2024-sports-attendance-ge...

[3] https://www.agf.de/en/services/press/press-release/tv-bilanz...

> Attendance is also on a steady upwards trend

> Professional sports in Germany attracted more fans than ever before in 2024; a trend not limited to just football.

Come on dude it's on the same page just below the initial summary which seems to be the only thing you bothered to read. It's even big bullet pointy for the attention starved...

>> German men’s football remains the most attended sport in the country by far. It is also a key driver of the overall attendance figures, with the top three professional leagues alone accounting for 46% of the growth since 2017/18.

I'm bias.

Born and raised in England, the nation of football, and I loathe football. The hooligan shenanigans we cause in other countries pisses me off. There is no respect.

I got pushed on the subway the other day because of some local match. Some drunken twat thought I was someone who supported the rival opposition and nearly dragged me off the opposite escalator. I can't wait for football to die, I partake in sports too, I sword fence.

While I can't vouch if it's the same for other countries where football isn't their thing. Generalizing for example Canada and Ice Hockey. But when I was in Canada coincidentally when national matches the vibe was holy different to that of Brits and football.

Totally fine. Still no need to spread FUD/misinformation.

Misrepresentation, yes. Neither FUD nor Misinformation when it's quoted out of the article

Next time just don't misrepresent stuff so I don't misrepresent you misrepresenting stuff. :)

> Same in Germany.

That's not right. Still expensive, but the dual abo for Sky Bundesliga + DAZN is 65€ per month.[1]

1 https://www.sky.de/pakete-produkte/sky-dazn

Still doesn't give you the full Champions League.

I get where the leagues came from, but the result for the customers has been worse.

65€ for watching _only_ football/soccer, Jesus :-D

That’s not enough. You also need Prime and RTL+.

I think it’s most likely that football is honestly a bit shit, and there are many better things to do for entertainment that don’t require mortgaging a kidney to watch.

try going to germany, where you can get a season ticket at top club for a few hundred euros.

i think Bayern Munich's cheapest season ticket is like $200 at the current exchange rate. that's manageable. i've paid more than that for a single NFL game in OK-ish seats.

You won't get a season ticket for most clubs in your lifetime, the queues are enormous, so the price point really doesn't matter.

What pisses me off over here, is that for some strange reason, well not strange rather the whole thing that is being discussed, we hardly get any matches on the radio, whereas in the south this is a given, even in Spain.

It is always some streaming service like Magenta Sport, and that's it.

Most leagues face the same issue: just one to three wealthy clubs dominate, winning around 70–80% of the time, which makes the competition less exciting. The German Bundesliga is one of the starkest examples: Bayern Munich has taken 16 of the last 20 titles.

haha, andy why is that?

Because of ridiculous transfer rules & markets - if these would be killed, there would be much more competition, and it was that way, 20-30+ years ago....

You can see this in most everything: 5 companies dominate IT, 3 companies dominate sodas, 3 companies dominate credit cards, etc. I think it is a byproduct of the way our current system works.

In Ireland it's closer to €200/month just for Soccer depending on who you support. As a result 1 in 5 homes in Ireland admit to having a 'dodgy box' - i.e. an android or SoC box capable of running an IPTV Subscription pirating live Digital TV and various streaming services. These are usually sold as an annual subscription for €50-100 in pubs and on places like facebook marketplace.

The Irish Legal Community has already raised issues with how Sky is going about tracking down infringement at the user level, as they have an appalling record in this area and are likely to try and emulate the egregious situation in Spain to mitigate or retaliate.

https://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/top-stories/2025/june/dodg... https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0619/1519317-data-prote...

What's even more ridiculous is the "3pm blackout" rule which prevents football matches from being shown on UK television between 14:45 and 17:15 on Saturdays when 50% of fixtures in the top two divisions are scheduled to kick off at 15:00. The policy was introduced in the 1960s to encourage fans to attend lower league games - and it remains in force even in the globalised streaming era. Sadly the rights-holders can't be bothered splitting the package for Ireland, so we get to pay more for SkySports and still have to buy additional services.

In short, piracy is always a service issue. As a soccer fan going legit you'd possibly need to maintain a Sky Sports, BT Sport, TNT Sports and Premier Sports subscription. God forbid you want screen-casting support or 4K resolution.

In Ireland you STILL can't purchase/watch UFC PPVs as one-offs, there isn't a way for you to watch it legally the next day or live as a single event. The only way would be to get a subscription to a big provider like SkyTV or NOW!

What pisses me off is that they've said (in Germany) that they are trying to avoid monopolies and the rights need to go to multiple rights owners. Instead of giving the same rights to multiple broadcasters as would be normal for real non-monopolies, they split up the rights and gave each part to a single broadcaster. Which means, the full broadcasting rights are held by multiple parties, e.g. it's not a monopoly, but each broadcaster has a monopoly over his part of the cake. Which means if you want to have the whole cake as a fan, you need to pay the cartel, i.e. all broadcasters at once.

Best way to watch sports now is to go to a bar that broadcasts it. If you have a drink, it only costs you 5EUR/match. Maybe you watch 5-6 matches a month, so still cheaper than 100EUR/month and you get drinks and service included.

Also can shout without neighbours calling police.

On the other hand, Serie A started streaming all matches free on YouTube for SEA countries.

https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1nf7ghg/serie_a_ann...

So only a VPN is needed?

the theory was that YT has pretty good VPN detection. But they stopped doing it immediately, so probably that didn't work out.

They pulled the plug on the project almost right away. Apparently, it had something to do with YouTube not being able to limit the live stream to Southeast Asian countries without it leaking to the rest of the world—where you’d need a pricey subscription to watch the game.

Oh, I didn't know that they pulled the plug.

> they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly

It's the same for anime, and guess what, I just pirate and pay no one.

Yes, but the problem is that you want to watch football live, and LaLiga is harming lots of unrelated businesses with this approach.

Yeah, it's hilarious that, on the same planet, we have articles like "Nine things I learned in ninety years" come out, while the courts of an EU country give "LaLiga," which appears to be a private corporation (a football company), the authority to ban any IPs they want arbitrarily, for everyone, country-wide. People just don't care any more, if ever did.

Couldn't they sue LaLiga for damages? Only because a court grants you some power you aren't absolved from the responsibilities that come with that power, or are you?

Cloudflare are https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-...

What complicates it is that the ISP, Telefonica, is also a Soccer rights-holder.

How they haven't sued La Liga for defamation is beyond me though; publicly condemning Cloudflare's role in enabling piracy by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit.

https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...

Traditionally all soccer organisations from FIFA down are absolutely rife with corruption and other criminal activity. Best to view current events through that lense. For example, Fifa in 2015 were done for bribery, fraud and money laundering to corrupt the issuing of media and marketing rights for FIFA games in the Americas, estimated at $150 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_FIFA_corruption_case

Exactly: Telefonica is not only the rights holder, it is an ISP… Which seems a conflict of interests but you know, Spain is different!

Sports have the kind of cultural power that you'd ordinarily only see from an organized, centralized, and probably Abrahamic religion. As a result they're able to commandeer the state in ways you'd only expect from an actual political party or an invading military force.

For example, it's common for sports teams in the US to browbeat cities into building them new sports-related infrastructure. Because they can threaten to move to LA, and then the public comment forms all get flooded with angry people who have no political opinion besides "WHY ARE YOU TAKING AWAY MY $SPORTSBALL_TEAM". This is papered over with a lot of excuses about "stadiums generating business revenue" (they don't lol) and people don't look too closely because nobody expects the sports people to be eating off the public dole like this.

The thing is, politicians also like sports because it's something that keeps people looking away from what they're doing. That's how sports leagues got to demand expensive stadiums in the first place. And every organization grows to fit its niche, because no one wants to take a paycut. So once sports leagues got used to having billionaire teams buying top talent to play in lavish taxpayer-funded stadiums, this sort of insane copyright nonsense becomes inevitable. LaLiga's business structure is too top-heavy to tolerate any amount of piracy. Anyone who isn't paying their tithe to the church of sportsball demands investigation, and anyone who obstructs such investigation is a threat to the sport.

If you're a Cloudflare customer who suffers damages when LaLiga obtains a DNS block for Cloudflare IPs used for pirate streams, you'll have better chances suing Cloudflare for failing to provide the service you're paying them for (of course if you're on a free plan, you don't have much of a leg to stand on).

One Cloudflare customer doing something illegal is only able to cause this much collateral damage because Cloudflare is set up so that taking down one customer requires taking down most of their infrastructure. But what works for DDoS protection doesn't work so well for legally mandated blocks. I think at some point Cloudflare will have to start kicking pirate streams off their platform faster if they want to stay up.

I'm not an ardent defender of Cloudflare by any means, but there is no grounds to sue Cloudflare. Their service is up. Their IP ranges are getting blocked by residential ISPs. How would that be Cloudflare's fault?

>How would that be Cloudflare's fault?

Because the reason they are getting blocked is because of the actions Cloudflare is taking. If cloudflare would stop streaming these pirate broadcasts, the blocking would stop. These blocks are not just random.

To be fair for anime you can get pretty good coverage with only crunchyroll and a minimal price. Though some significant shows often end up locked on random services unfortunately.

To get subs in my language I do have to go to go-anime. Which is btw pretty bad (sometimes you have to reload 30 times before something starts, summaries are wrong, no chromecasting, etc.)

> To be fair for anime you can get pretty good coverage with only crunchyroll and a minimal price

Depending on if crunchyroll is available in your region :) . And they have some truly awful subtitles for some shows.

those pirated anime (esp. speed subs) mostly also just steal the crunchyroll subtitles as well, so if it was awful there, it will be also awful in the pirated version!

Anime has long had a model where shows are ‘free’ (historically, on broadcast TV) and the money comes from sales of disks, manga, and other merchandise. (On the other hand, Japan has copyright laws that make the US look laid back.)

Currently having this fight with hockey in the US. If I want to watch all of my team's games it's $65/mo split across 3 separate services

NFL and NASCAR are similar.

The main reason I don't watch any one it is because it's all locked away under expensive subscriptions and I don't really live in a place with great football matches, so yeah...I'd actually be into it if it was accessible, I just couldn't be bothered figuring out how to watch it, nor can I afford 100 euroes a month.

> newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football, much less than their parents and grandparents.

These are good news, tbh.

100 euros monthly is going to be very high anywhere, this is completely insane.

So it looks like a self resolving problem? As a bonus football hooligans and football vandalism will disappear, and hopefully kids will be encouraged to do more creative activities than kicking a ball.

On the other hand kids (and adults) not getting enough exercise is a modern health crisis. More kids kicking a ball would be significant improvement over current status quo of kids staring at brainrot.

agree. im american and i see a bunch of youth in major cities who are clearly unhealthy.

sport should be encouraged. i get that not everyone likes it, and not everyone will enjoy it (and even fewer will be good enough to actually enjoy it), but encouraging physical activity instead of playing on phones is a good thing.

i was a nerd growing up (still am) and i sucked at sports (still do). i still enjoyed doing them and knew that physical activity was beneficial.

I agree with all you said except the last part.

Sport is good and team sport is better. A "lifestyle guru" should know that. Kicking a ball is maybe the lowest entry barrier sport in many countries. I'm from latin america and here you grow playing fútbol. Find a ball, gather your friends and you're ready to go.

you don't think kids should play sports? that seems like an unusual view and am kind of curious why you would think that.

Kick a ball, throw a ball, hit a ball, jump over the ball, stick a ball somewhere. A ball, a stick, a ring, a board. I hate that football is the default sport and was forced myself to play it in my childhood.

Look, I disliked football for the reason that it made me an outcast. All males in my class in elementary school played football on a regular basis. I did not. It made me associate more with another guy (only 1, yeah) and girls. It made me just pick up a book and read while others were playing sports (happened to be football).

... but I did make myself an outcast as I was growing up as I would rather use my PC (for programming) than go outside.

> I hate that football is the default sport

It is the default sport because the barrier to entry is basically having a ball. Random rocks, backpacks, whatever you have can serve as the goalposts.

Most other sports require other equipment too (volleyball needs the net, basketball the hoop, etc. etc.).

It's also easy to understand, and being the most popular sport by far in most countries, allows for an easy appropriation to a community and sense of belonging.

> was forced myself to play it in my childhood

So you're just trauma dumping your childhood issues?

also football can be played in basically any number, from 1:1 to 11:11, which means you can go out with a ball, meet one other kid and play, and random other kids can just join in.

I've literally seen kids unable to speak with each other because of different languages able to join a match :)

I was terrible at football as a kid so it's not like it did much for me, but one cannot deny how universal the game is.

That's true. It's not unique to football (same can be applied to basketball and volleyball and etc.) but it's one more advantage.

> As a bonus football hooligans and football vandalism will disappear,

You think these people would suddenly stop needing an outlet for their emotions? They'll find a different way of doing the same thing, around a different theme. If you've hanged out with people who are proud to be hooligans and ultras today, you'd see how removing football wouldn't get them to stop.

> You think these people would suddenly stop needing an outlet for their emotions?

It is not an outlet for emotions that would need to be expressed similarly. It on itself creates emotions and social structures that make those expressions violent.

> They'll find a different way of doing the same thing, around a different theme.

Some of them will, some of them wont. They wont be in such a large pack in the same place at the same time. There will be less peer pressure to participate in these groups on young men and less validation.

They will have much harder time to organize too.

Given your username I wouldn't expect such harsh sentiment about people who enjoy playing football. I would prefer my kids play a sport they enjoy than sit on an iPad all day. But I'm not a lifestyle guru.

European football is more about gambling, betting, and drug trafficking than about sport.

Utter nonsense.

It's about sport and community. Yeah, the Bulgarian football scene is dominated by the mafia and gambling, but that's the exception, not the norm.

Polish football is mafia an gambling, one of the largest Greek companies is... football prognostic agency. Spanish players are millionaires in early 20s while others get 10% unemployment and if lucky salary 1200 euro. European football is cesspit.

Hooligans won't go away with football, they'll just find another outlet for their suppressed beta male rage and weak minded tribalism.

Kicking a ball is fun though. However I am not interested in watching pros kicking a ball.

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