Why do they not pay for streams? Is this a “cable sub cost is too high” or a “broadcasters want to blackout stream so only locals and the right networks can see the game” situation?

EDIT: “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell [0]

[0] https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...

It really doesn't matter.

The issue isn't "some people don't pay for sports streams". The issue is that some corporate fucktards have managed, through the power of lobbying, backroom deals and blatant corruption, to get an engine of country-wide internet censorship to be created - and then abused on their behalf.

This isn't the first, or the tenth, time it happens. People should have been sued, fired and jailed after the first time they blocked the entirety of Cloudflare for inane "copyright" reasons - and yet, nothing was done, and the censorship persists.

I can answer for Italy which has the same issue, and a similar "solution",and it's the first option.

Watching football has become really expensive in the last decade and people are fed up.

Also, sometimes you need different subscriptions to watch all the games of your team.

Meanwhile, piracy is cheap and convenient.

At least here in italy, for some people it's just too expensive to care about paying, for some people it's just that they don't want to pay for it even on cheaper plans which were launched recently at a reasonable - well, more or less - price.

We have a similar anti piracy shield and once we got some Google cdn down for half an hour. Imagine not being able to use Google drive because the football league is trying to block football piracy streams - which are trivially searchable online anyway

Football is just ridiculous in general. They sell off different parts of the competitions to different services so you need to subscribe to multiple companies to watch them all. It’s just tremendous corporate greed at the expense of fans. Players are being bought for hundreds of millions - that money is all coming from increasing subscription costs and rinsing fans around the world.

Rights holders can, at any time, make the distribution of games smooth and affordable.

Their choice to infinitely segment sports broadcast results in piracy.

If you want to watch all of your team's games you need to a) purchase an expensive monthly cable subscription from the company that holds the football rights. b) pay a sizeable sum on top, I think it's about 50 euros per month to be able to watch the actual matches.

This is just for La Liga games, you'll need to pay extra if your team plays in other competitions.

The main issue isn't that they're blocking the streams: it's that the blocks are so broad they're blocking huge swathes of other parts of the internet. Instead of blocking somepiratesite.futbol they're blocking Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, AWS, etc

La liga wants to get rid of illegal streams so they can ask for more money for the licenses.

Paid Streaming or TV is quite expensive. It's mostly because you have to buy the whole package which includes everything else the company provides. Like Golf or Nascar or whatever they find on ESPN 8.

Also paying for a stream only really benefits the rich clubs. The money la liga earns for tv rights is split between professional teams with Barcelona and the two Madrids receiving about 30% of the money. The other 17 teams get the rest. Some fans don't want to see them getting more money (small percentage but never underestimate fans)

You can't imagine how much you have to pay in Spain for the right of seeing a single La Liga match.

Oh wait, you cannot do that. You have to pay for all the championship together with the Champions League and what not.

Sky in Germany was infamous for not providing nearly close to enough servers to support streaming of high profile games. And their cable TV box used extremely sub-par SoCs which made for an atrocious user experience.

In addition the cost only went upwards while the offering reduced every season as Dazn and other players entered the field. I said goodbye to soccer a few years prior to Covid.

The reason is irrelevant. Only the private censorship perpertrated by the copyright industry matters.

Is it a cultural thing? Computers and copyright are fairly recent innovations in some parts of Europe such as Spain and Italy. Certainly well into the 90s you could still buy pirated media, especially video games, from every mom and pop store.