My Game's Server Is Blocked in Spain Whenever There's a Football Match On
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LaLiga's anti-piracy efforts are causing widespread internet disruptions in Spain during football matches, with many users reporting blocked access to various websites and services, sparking outrage and concerns about censorship and overreach.
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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?
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
1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof.
2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs.
3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.
Ultimately point number 3 is a prediction. I could see that happening, but I am not convinced it's set in stone that the blocking would just increase. And even if that happens, and even bigger ranges are blocked, and even more stuff breaks, perhaps more people will start to notice and put an end to this, to CloudFlare's delight.
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.”
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.
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]
1 https://www.sky.de/pakete-produkte/sky-dazn
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.
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....
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.
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.
... but I did make myself an outcast as I was growing up as I would rather use my PC (for programming) than go outside.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_FIFA_corruption_case
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.
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.
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.
Depending on if crunchyroll is available in your region :) . And they have some truly awful subtitles for some shows.
These are good news, tbh.
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.
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 ;)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
[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.
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)
On the other hand, there's SpaceX which has the power to block an entire country from accessing the internet.
> 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.
1. Someone sitting next to you in a bar is playing a match on their phone, but the bar is not.
2. Your phone has the app installed and hears the match.
3. La Liga sues the bar?
They would have higher priority situations where dozens of phones hit at the same time in the same bar.
That seems as if it would be so easy to fake...
I assume the pint glass pops up at intervals that the investigators would know and the general public would not, so you'd need some kind of central service with someone watching the commercial stream and showing/hiding the pint glass at the right intervals. In which case it would make more sense to operate a central service just pirating the commercial stream, which I'm sure does happen and does get shut down.
This would be the smart way to do it. But now think about how you'd do it the lazy way...
I don't know if Sky does it, but Foxtel in Australia, in addition to the pint glass watermark, have a separate set of channels for public venues, which have different ad breaks/content to residential subscriptions. (https://www.foxtelmedia.com.au/foxtel-media-network/fox-venu...)
How is that not personal data?
I'll have to look that up, but as someone else said it's only enforced at EU member state level, however there is another central oversight to ensure it's enforced.
This is almost certainly a thought experiment though, the amount of engineering effort required to ensure no logs of any kind could result in deriving the IP address of the user would be high, and they’re probably not doing it (even if they are actually not sending any identifying information directly).
You might also find that you have to take special care to avoid creating circumstances that allow inference of personal information. For example, sampling every night at 11pm, you’re very likely to be able to determine an address or approximate location of the subscribers home.
I'm not a legal professional. I just work next to this stuff.
Legitimate interest is about collection of data necessary to operate your service.
Listening to detect if someone in a user's surrounding is showing a match without license has nothing to do with the function of the application. There's no legitimate interest there.
IANALEither
If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.
I understand why the NFL is going the stream route given how popular it is already. They can afford to inconvenience people. But MLB has been stagnant or declining for so long. You'd think they'd make their content more accessible to grow the fan base.
What's weird to me is that the MLB does seem to genuinely be trying to make changes in terms of gameplay to try to keep relevant (especially around reviews for on-field calls, but also in terms of some of the changes in recent years that were controversial but seem to have produced meaningful results in reversing some of the creep in how long it takes for games to finish), and my understanding is that they basically were the first major sports league in the US to invest in streaming technology, to the point where I remember reading that the NHL app (and maybe some of the others) were originally developed and maintained by MLB's programmers as well. I'm not sure how they've managed to fall so far behind in terms of streaming experience; the most apparent difference is that the baseball season is over ten times as many games, which presumably could have some sort of effect on things, but my naive expectation would be that it would incentive having a stable infrastructure for this even more. Maybe it's just a matter of them being able to get away with blocking some games because there are still so many others that don't get blocked during the rest of the season? With only 16 games in a regular season, blocking even one of them might just be something viewers are less willing to put up with.
It's because they need to keep the broadcasters and the teams happy and broadcasters want to have exclusive content. In some markets, teams want local blackouts to help get butts in seats.
How much do GPS/Galileo/GNSS jammers go for nowadays?
This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid.
Applies to all venues and events. Bars, restaurants, grocery shops, barbers, sports events, concerts, taxis, lounges, everything with an audience.
I don't want to say it's the same everywhere in the EU, but I have always assumed it's a common concept in most western countries at least.
I’m sure the prices have gone up since that comment, but 200€/month actually seems very reasonable for a commercial bar that shows sporting events. That’s let’s than 7€/day and would be more than covered by the first group of people walking in the door and buying a round of drinks.
I don’t approve of the microphone activation spying stuff or the ridiculous internet blocking. However it’s also kind of bizarre that it reached this point when the monthly fees for bar owners were such a trivial amount.
There is no daily Spanish football.
There are also things like 'interland breaks' or vacation periods when there is no football for two or more consecutive weeks, but the fee still needs to be payed.
It's a monothematic sporting desert.
I'm glad I raised my kids oblivious to this football religion.
"LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
Thanks Tebas.
Spanish are surprisingly quiet about that or they bought vpn en masse.
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