The UK’s premier league tv rights are worth a little bit over £1bn/yr. The rights holders are tv companies who also run most of the UK’s domestic telecoms, so they lobby incredibly hard and effectively to have pirate match streaming sites blocked.
Blocking itself is ofcourse not at all controversial in Europe. Aside from some free speech maximalists people have no problem with shutting down criminal operations.
I do not think blocking websites was a goal in either of those mergers, they were just trying to become big like Apple/Amazon/etc and not just be a dumb pipe like ISPs should be.