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?
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.
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!
“Vuelva usted mañana.”
There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches.
Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to illegal streams of a live event. My understanding is that CloudFlare is largely out of the picture when this decision is happening, and CloudFlare is only taking the blame since that's what Twitch uses, which also can't react as quickly as La Liga wants.
That being said there is a solution to this that helps protect from collateral as well as the decentralized open nature of the internet: moving away from those large CDNs
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.
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...
> Professional sports in Germany attracted more fans than ever before in 2024; a trend not limited to just football.
>> 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.
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.
That's not right. Still expensive, but the dual abo for Sky Bundesliga + DAZN is 65€ per month.[1]
I get where the leagues came from, but the result for the customers has been worse.
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.
It is always some streaming service like Magenta Sport, and that's it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1nf7ghg/serie_a_ann...
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.
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.
... but I did make myself an outcast as I was growing up as I would rather use my PC (for programming) than go outside.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's the same for anime, and guess what, I just pirate and pay no one.
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.
One Cloudflare customer doing something illegal is only able to cause this much collateral damage because Cloudflare is 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.
Depending on if crunchyroll is available in your region :) . And they have some truly awful subtitles for some shows.
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!
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1np6kyn/my_games_s...
Edit: commenters below made me realize that my extension StopTheMadness messed up old Reddit. Sorry
What OS are you on and what is the specific problem you see when you try to load this Old Reddit link from OP?
I had an option called “Protect page zoom controls” which allows you to zoom on sites that disable zoom, but it breaks this website.
Seriously though, seconded that old works great still on ios 26.
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.
It's a monothematic sporting desert.
I'm glad I raised my kids oblivious to this football religion.
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.
I for one think that football streaming should be blocked when I'm pulling docker images ;)
Thanks Tebas.
Not sure how attached these sites are to their specific brand/domain (or if this is indirect where main sites link to other sites that host the video)
[1] https://www.genbeta.com/actualidad/gol-laliga-a-cloudflare-j...
[2] https://www.xataka.com/legislacion-y-derechos/bloqueos-ip-la...
Cloudflare also said they are prepared to go all the way to EU courts if necessary.
Spanish are surprisingly quiet about that or they bought vpn en masse.
On the other hand, there's SpaceX which has the power to block an entire country from accessing the internet.
"LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain"
> 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.
Just, so that you know what is really going on.
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.
This is what's happening in Italy, for example.
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.
E.g. I go to the pub, have a drink and watch some random LaLiga match on my phone?
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.
How is that not personal data?
If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.
It seems that being a crook is a requirement to be on the management of any national football league, from Brazilian CBF to FIFA and La Liga.
god forbid they exercise, they should be indoors studying or playing on their phones 100% of the time. </s>
maybe the world would be a better place without football hooligans, sure. but without a sport that billions love and play? no.
Then they use the taxes to buy petroleum products from Qatar.
Then Qatar spends €262 millions on a single football player and gazillions on a European club, which is at €889 million loss over the last five years
In the end, who is paying for it all? Ordinary people ultimately foot the bill – whether through higher energy prices, taxes, or the opportunity cost of that money leaving the productive economy – while the football circus rolls on.
This isn't how the energy market works.
But whether it is at the pump or through subsidies, it is still ordinary people who end up carrying the cost — and that money gets recycled into football vanity projects.
> On 27 Nov 23:27, operations@friendmts.com wrote: To whom it may concern:
Our reference: PRB-XXXXXX Security Code: 2x364371x-x45x-59x2-8760-32x46276790
Access to the IP address detailed below has been blocked in the United Kingdom by court order.
The block will apply to: IP Address: 95.217.118.31 For all Premier League Match Periods Until: 07 Dec 2020
Further notifications will not be sent about this IP address unless and until further infringements are detected after the date and time indicated above, though the IP address will remain subject to blocking until then. If your organisation is planning to reallocate this IP address to another customer before the date listed above, please notify us at ipallocation@friendmts.com with the appropriate information so that we can consider releasing the IP from subsequent blocking.
A copy of the court order, which was obtained by the Football Association Premier League Limited is available here: https://www.fmtsoperations.com/HC-2017-002013-ORDER.PDF
Any affected server operator or hosting provider has the right to apply to the Court to discharge or vary the Order.
4ndrewl•3h ago