La Liga have been vociferous and active in their attempts to combat piracy over the last couple of years, but it has led to a rather damaging faux pas. On Sunday, the league’s measures taken to block illegal broadcasting of El Clasico ended up impacting on people’s banking and bureaucracy.
None more so than President Javier Tebas, who has previously claimed that he spends around 60% of his time fighting television piracy, his primary cause for La Liga. One of the ways in which La Liga attempts to fight pirate streaming of La Liga is by blocking connection to websites via their IP address. However their ability to do so for the right addresses is clearly limited, following a report from El Diario, as seen on RAC1.
La Liga block Twitter, Snapchat and CaixaBank
The mistake comes from the use of Cloudflare technology. The American company provides connection services, and also hide the identity of users on the internet. Since the start of the year though, La Liga have been given permission to use technology to block certain IP addresses, and it was in use during El Clasico on Sunday. Some of the affected sites included Snapchat, Twitter/X, the Council of Madrid site, CaixaBank and Microsoft.
Image via Alex Caparros / Getty Images
This is not the first time this has occurred, and La Liga decided to limit their use of the technology as a result, but it was back in action for the biggest game of the year. On previous occasions, those sites have begun legal proceedings against La Liga, claiming losses that La Liga are responsible for, hence their decision to rein back their usage of it.
More illegal streaming in Spain than anywhere else
Spain is reportedly one of the biggest offenders when it comes to illegal football streaming, and Tebas has made it his mission to tackle problem. He believes that it is responsible for hundreds of millions of euros flowing out of the industry. Detractors have claimed that the disproportionate amount of streaming in Spain comes down to the high price of subscriptions in Spain to watch football, which is by a distance the most expensive of Europe’s top five leagues. Tebas has denied that it is too expensive, claiming that the market sets the price, despite La Liga agreeing to broadcast games free of charge in China, the world’s largest market.
