My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on
81 comments
·September 24, 2025dabeeeenster
Phemist
Wait, does that also mean bars have to police what people are watching on their phone, otherwise risking big fines?
E.g. I go to the pub, have a drink and watch some random LaLiga match on my phone?
piltdownman
No, the bar pays something like 10x the price of a normal subscription to be able to publicly show live Sports as a draw for their customers.
In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract.
https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/668952/why-pub-TV...
La Liga are presumably muxing infrasonic audio into their residential streams to try and:
(a) watermark the residential account(s) used to provide the streaming services so they can prosecute the providers
(b) Detect commercial usage of residential accounts used in piracy to prosecute the venues, by listening out via the App.
They could presumably get around GDPR by virtue of the fact they're only listening and recording audio out of human audible range, and only for identification of copyright infringement as per the TOS of the La Liga App.
Lucasoato
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).
Hendrikto
> 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.
wobfan
> Same in Germany.
That's not right. Still expensive, but the dual abo for Sky Bundesliga + DAZN is 65€ per month.[1]
mschuster91
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.
BoredPositron
>>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...
doublerabbit
> 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.
madaxe_again
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.
piltdownman
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!
XCSme
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 match, so still cheaper than 100EUR/month and you get drinks and service included.
koakuma-chan
> 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.
Krssst
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.
maeln
> 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.
teekert
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.)
pfortuny
Yes, but the problem is that you want to watch football live, and LaLiga is harming lots of unrelated businesses with this approach.
koakuma-chan
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.
xg15
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?
rootsu
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...
average_r_user
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.
rootsu
Oh, I didn't know that they pulled the plug.
zwirbl
So only a VPN is needed?
mlinhares
100 euros monthly is going to be very high anywhere, this is completely insane.
lifestyleguru
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.
aeve890
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.
bilekas
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.
lifestyleguru
European football is more about gambling, betting, and drug trafficking than about sport.
CaptainOfCoit
> 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.
watwut
> 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.
CuriouslyC
Hooligans won't go away with football, they'll just find another outlet for their suppressed beta male rage and weak minded tribalism.
zokier
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.
dnh44
you don't think kids should play sports? that seems like an unusual view and am kind of curious why you would think that.
lifestyleguru
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.
iamzenitraM
Some of us are tracking their blocking over at:
https://hayahora.futbol https://tinyuptime.sconde.net
It's not only Cloudflare, but also other not so tiny CDNs are being blocked - currently an entire Backblaze B2 region is blocked in 3 out of 5 ISPs (!).
Particularly hurtful, the entire Cloudflare R2 is blocked during football matches so you can't pull Docker images or Ollama models.
teekert
Man, and I was already annoyed that my tax money went to extra police to prevent idiots from fighting and wrecking stuff around matches.
I for one think that football streaming should be blocked when I'm pulling docker images ;)
pzlarsson
The amount of resources that goes into soccer in many countries is really astonishing. It can be seen as a modern equivalent to bread and circuses however.
pmontra
Yes, we know. Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches.
It would be more interesting to know if something is getting done about this. Other businesses must work, people must communicate, the very same Spanish state must keep working. Is there any protest with at least a slight amount of hope?
Nyr
Internet mostly works in Spain when there is a match: one can see traffic figures from the mayor exchange points: they are unaffected.
Big businesses are unaffected, since LaLiga will quickly reverse any block that impacts popular websites and risks triggering significant public outcry.
Most people in Spain don’t care — and many aren’t even aware of the overly broad blocks.
Cloudflare and RootedCON are challenging this in court, but it may take many years before a final outcome is reached.
Telemakhos
> the very same Spanish state must keep working
“Vuelva usted mañana.”
CaptainOfCoit
Apparently it's not being communicated properly, or you don't actually read what you come across, because "Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches" isn't true at all.
Large parts are blocked, yes, as collateral damage. But it doesn't seem like they're completely switching it off, as obviously then there would be huge protests, mostly because people wouldn't be able to legally watch the games then!
asddubs
I obviously don't agree with spain doing this, but I also have trouble feeling sorry for cloudflare, since they're also in the business of randomly blocking certain IPs from accessing half the internet
dncornholio
Cloudflare created a problem where everything is centralized.
It's also, not that great. Even the most crude WordPress vulnerability scan requests aren't flagged or blocked. It seems most DDoS attacks may come through as well.
Don't get me even started on the checkbox.
It's a US data-hoarder.
forinti
And I thought things were bad in my country where all "sports" shows are about football and you can have 3 different FM stations broadcasting the same game and they'll discuss football even when there is nothing going on.
It's a monothematic sporting desert.
I'm glad I raised my kids oblivious to this football religion.
null
aosaigh
I might be naive, but this is absolutely outrageous. What laws allow a private company dictate what IPs can be banned across an entire country? Are the ISPs voluntarily cooperating or are they now all obliged to follow LaLiga requests?
erremerre
ISP with the right to football goes to court to report themselves (not a joke) about piracy happening in their networks.
An old man judge which understand technology as much as I understand biochemistry (nothing) decides that they need to stop piracy, His solution is to give laliga the power to block those illegal streams, that all ISP must comply for the time that a match exist. The judge covers himself by saying, that the blockage can't affect third parties.
All ISP happy comply. It does affect third parties.
Cloudflare (third party) puts a recourse to say that it is affecting their business. The very same old man, decides, that is not going to proceed with that investigation.
So cloudflare needs to to through a different slower legal procedure.
Meanwhile, we have a company with the authority to block what they want thanks to corruption.
rock_artist
In the reddit there's a link to another article related and there's response from Laliga (If I got it right):
> Desde LaLiga también advierten que "aquellos clientes de Cloudflare que puedan sufrir bloqueos en sus webs, pueden dirigirse al email afectadoscloudflare@laliga.es con el fin de hacer llegar a Cloudflare que el contenido ilegal alojado en la IP de su misma web no tiene su autorización".
So they eventually made an email to report if you're being affected by their blocking.
erremerre
What they do if receive such an email, it is to bully and threaten the owner of the webpage saying that their web is hosted in the same IP than pirates streaming and they would take legal action.
Just, so that you know what is really going on.
arximboldi
But the intent of that email is not to unblock the IP, but to put pressure on Cloudfare to stop giving service to the allegedly pirate sites.
nromiun
That is wild. Which other country gives a private body the power to ban any IP address for the entire country?
npteljes
Larger discussion here:
"LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain"
aucisson_masque
I’m surprised it’s still going on. There are things a southern Europe government shouldn’t mess with, gas prices and football are part of them.
Spanish are surprisingly quiet about that or they bought vpn en masse.
Related (7 years ago):
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses...
- Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.
- The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions.
- La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect if the sound matches with that of a football match. In addition, it uses the geolocation of the phone to locate exactly where the establishment is located. That way they can locate bars and other establishments where football is being pirated or showed without paying for the bar package.
Still amazes me this just sort of went by and no one really seemed bothered. Absolutely insane.