Spain’s LaLiga teams with Fastly to target streaming piracy

The two companies are working on a joint anti-piracy innovation project with the dual goals of helping platforms combat piracy and enabling rights holders like LaLiga to preserve the economic value of their copyrighted content.  

LaLiga has estimated that piracy costs its clubs between €600 to €700m a year.

Fastly and LaLiga began collaborating last year, aiming to disrupt unauthorised streaming sites active on each match day.

Fastly has developed a targeted, intelligent detection system that leverages AI and proprietary content signals to identify illegal streams in real time.

A 2025 study by Grant Thornton revealed that at least 10.8 million unauthorised retransmissions of live events were detected in 2024. Over 81% of these retransmissions were never suspended, and only 2.7% were addressed within the first 30 minutes of the event.

Fastly’s solution is designed to address these challenges by enabling the removal of illegal content with greater precision, without needing to resort to legal enforcement measures against intermediaries.

“At LaLiga, we have succeeded in reducing piracy of our streams in Spain by 60% during the 2024/25 season through a comprehensive, end-to-end strategy focused on legal, educational, institutional, and technological measures,” said Javier Tebas, President at LaLiga. “This success is due in large part to our ecosystem of partners like Fastly, enabling us to continue exploring new and more effective ways to tackle piracy at its root.”

Kelly Shortridge, Chief Product Officer at Fastly, added: “Unlike alternative approaches based on regional blocking, our strategy focuses on precision, letting fans enjoy the game while protecting content from abuse by criminals.”

Spanish football league LaLiga has agreed a new set of domestic media contracts for more than €5.25bn, with Telefónica and DAZN retaining rights from 2027 to 2032. Discover more here.