Fastly and LALIGA, Spain’s Professional Football Association, announced they have teamed up to develop technical solutions to address the illegal streaming of live sports, with special focus on LALIGA’s matches. With LALIGA estimating that piracy costs its clubs between $700-$800 million (€600-€700 million) each year, the two companies are collaborating 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 strategic and economic value of their copyrighted content by mitigating illegal use.
Fastly and LALIGA began collaborating last year, motivated by the scale of illegal streaming of live sports, with numerous unauthorized streaming sites active on each match day. To help LALIGA combat this content theft, 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 unauthorized 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 by its platform customers with enhanced precision and dramatically reduces the window of opportunity for piracy. This unique approach reflects Fastly’s strong commitment to leveraging technology to help its customers protect their platforms and rights holders better protect their intellectual property 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. LALIGA remains firmly committed to putting an end to piracy, and achieving this goal requires the collaboration of all stakeholders working together.”
LALIGA and Fastly’s joint initiative comes as part of their wider efforts that allow media and publishing companies to flag confirmed pirated content and segments. Fastly and LALIGA are actively collaborating with other technology companies, publishers, and regulators to develop software solutions and best practices that quickly detect and disable unauthorized streaming while leaving all other traffic untouched.
This collaboration also reinforces Fastly’s commitment to its customer community and working with organizations like LALIGA that share a joint vision of acting with integrity to build a more trustworthy web that benefits both consumers and the organizations that entertain, inform, and engage them.
“Unlike alternative approaches based on regional blocking, our strategy focuses on precision, letting fans enjoy the game while protecting content from abuse by criminals,” said Kelly Shortridge, Chief Product Officer at Fastly. “At Fastly, we love co-innovating with customers to solve their thorniest challenges, and we look forward to continuing our work with LALIGA to help protect content owners around the world.”
