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).

> 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.

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!

What pisses me off is that they've said (in Germany) that they are trying to avoid monopolies and the rights need to go to multiple rights owners. Instead of giving the same rights to multiple broadcasters as would be normal for real non-monopolies, they split up the rights and gave each part to a single broadcaster. Which means, the full broadcasting rights are held by multiple parties, e.g. it's not a monopoly, but each broadcaster has a monopoly over his part of the cake. Which means if you want to have the whole cake as a fan, you need to pay the cartel, i.e. all broadcasters at once.

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 month, so still cheaper than 100EUR/month and you get drinks and service included.

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...

> 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.

Currently having this fight with hockey in the US. If I want to watch all of my team's games it's $65/mo split across 3 separate services

The main reason I don't watch any one it is because it's all locked away under expensive subscriptions and I don't really live in a place with great football matches, so yeah...I'd actually be into it if it was accessible, I just couldn't be bothered figuring out how to watch it, nor can I afford 100 euroes a month.

> newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football, much less than their parents and grandparents.

These are good news, tbh.

100 euros monthly is going to be very high anywhere, this is completely insane.

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.