For the Premier League and its 20 member clubs, the issue around the illegal streaming of matches poses a significant threat, particularly when it comes to the big team’s transfer spending habits.

The strength of English football’s top tier and its rise to being a dominant force as the most watched and most lucrative domestic league in world football, has long allowed it to bring in huge sums of cash from broadcasters to show games. It’s created a £12billion-plus revenue stream for every four-year cycle that finds itself facing major pressure from piracy, with broadcasters losing patience, and clubs staring down a future where the financial engine that powers English football starts to misfire, and the returns fall away.

In the UK, watching football legally has become a premium product. There are few things that drive subscriptions to a streaming service like live sport, and, in particular, the Premier League. It doesn’t come cheap for consumers, though. A full subscription setup that would include Sky Sports and TNT Sports via the Discovery+ app can cost more than £1,000 per year, and even then, fans can’t watch every game due to the fact that the 3pm blackout still applies. With such high costs, football fans have tried to find ways to work around the issue.

Fire Sticks

Modified Amazon Fire Sticks, IPTV services, and Telegram links have created a serious problem for broadcast chiefs. Sky estimates Fire Sticks account for “probably about half” of all Premier League piracy in the UK. According to 2024 GlobalData research, the cost annually to English football’s elite competition is more than £20m.

In a football ecosystem where broadcasters are faced with stumping up more cash every rights cycle, it is impactful. The Premier League blocked more than 600,000 illegal streams during the 2022/23 season, and industry sources suggest the number is even higher in 2024/25. Enforcement has intensified, with more coordinated raids and an increased number of High Court orders, but the scale of piracy has continued to grow, with access to it now more prevalent than ever before.

Tom Burrows, global head of rights at global sports streaming platform DAZN, told the Financial Times Business of Football Summit back in February that piracy is “almost a crisis,” warning: “There’s almost an argument to say you can’t get exclusive rights anymore because piracy is so bad.” The exclusivity that underpins broadcast deals is being eroded, and when exclusivity goes, so does value.

Premier League club executives will have had growing concerns over this trend. Broadcast rights, for the majority of the 20 member clubs in the Premier League, remains the single most important revenue stream. But whether you’re chasing Champions League football or fighting relegation to the Championship, it is a core revenue pillar. A sustained drop in rights value doesn’t just affect next season’s transfer budget. It affects multi-year planning, stadium investment, academy funding, and regulatory compliance. Clubs build their financial models around predictable broadcast income, some even borrow against it. If piracy continues to undermine that predictability, the entire ecosystem becomes more fragile.

That erosion is already visible. The domestic deal for 2022/25 stood at around £4.9bn. The international deal was around £5bn. The domestic deal was struck over three years, with 200 live games available through various packages. That worked out at £1.633bn per season, with the bulk of that money distributed to the member clubs through equal share payments and merit payments, with those split between domestic and international rights.

Sky Sports and TNT Sports were the two to win the rights from 2025, with the deal now worth £6.7bn, but over four years instead of three, and with 270 live games available instead of 200. Amazon did not come back to the table, while DAZN, who were tipped to make a play, also did not feature. That meant an absence of streamers from the next cycle, something which flies in the face of where the long-term future of live sports broadcasting exists, as traditional paid-for bundling becomes more and more challenged.

But that £6.7bn deal might, on the face of it, seem like a big £1.8bn bump for the Premier League, but over an extra year it means that the value of the package has actually risen by £42m per season, from £1.633bn to £1.675bn, and that is with an additional 70 games. To break that down further, the value placed on each game for 2022/25 was around £8.16m. For 2025/29, with the extra games, that sits at £6.2m in terms of the value placed on each game, a drop of £1.96m per game.

International rights still have room to climb, especially in the US and MENA regions. But even there, the ceiling is in sight. Streamers like Amazon and Apple have entered the market, but they’re not paying the kind of money that had been on the table from traditional linear broadcasters. The strategy of sports streamers is a global, long-term, and data-driven one, and they are highly unlikely to engage in a bidding war and overpay for a domestic product that’s leaking value.

If piracy forces a 15% reduction in the next rights cycle, the broadcast pool could shrink from £3.3bn to £2.8bn. That equates to a potential £300m–£500m lost across the league annually. For clubs like Burnley or Bournemouth, that could mean losing 20–30% of their total revenue. For top-six sides, while the impact would be less keenly felt, it’s the difference between signing a marquee player or balancing the books.

​​​​​​​Money talks

Broadcast revenue is the Premier League’s financial backbone. In 2023/24, clubs generated a record £6.35billion in total revenue, according to Deloitte. Of that, £3.3billion came from broadcast income—more than 50% of the league’s total. For mid-table and lower-tier clubs, that figure often climbs to 60-70%. For that particular financial year, clubs like Luton Town and Sheffield United relied heavily on equal share payments and facility fees to keep the lights on. Each club receives £29.8m as an equal share, plus £1.6m per league position in merit payments, and £830,000 for every televised match. Liverpool, for example, earned £24.9m in facility fees alone during the 2024/25 season. That’s no small amount of money, that’s money that can be put to work strengthening the squad.

If broadcast income drops, the ripple effects are immediate. Solidarity payments to EFL clubs shrink. Parachute payments for relegated sides get scaled back. Grassroots funding dries up. Clubs already under regulatory pressure from trying to comply with the Premier League’s financial controls, face tighter margins and tougher decisions.

The financial model that underpins English football assumes continued growth in broadcast rights. The success of the league has pretty much been predicated on it. But if piracy undermines exclusivity, broadcasters will push back. Shorter deals. Lower fees. Flexible rights structures. That introduces volatility to the market. Clubs may delay stadium upgrades, reduce academy investment, or hedge transfer spending. Multi-year budgets rely on predictable income. Volatility kills planning.

Law enforcement is stretched when it comes to tackling the problem. Emma Warbey, head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, said last year in a statement that illegal streaming in the UK has gone “through the roof.” Her team targets resellers and organised crime groups, not individual users – but the risks are real.

She said: “These criminals are using that money, your hard-earned money, for lots of different things—usually drugs, certainly forced labour, people trafficking, huge amounts of other criminality that you’re feeding into. So it isn’t a victimless crime.”

Warbey warned that many users don’t realise they’re handing personal data to fraudsters. Cease-and-desist letters are now being used to target bedroom-level sellers. “We know what you’re doing, this is the law you’re breaking, and if you carry on, we will come and arrest you.” It’s a blunt message, but a necessary one.

The cost-of-living crisis and a squeeze on household incomes has only accelerated the trend and exacerbated the problem. Illegal Fire Sticks – preloaded with apps that stream sport from around the world – are now ubiquitous. Broadcasters warn that this normalisation of piracy is devaluing the entire sports rights market, and they’re demanding that action be taken before it’s too late.

Recently, Amazon has responded. The latest incarnation of the Fire Stick runs on Vega OS, a different operating system that has replaced Android and blocks sideloaded apps – the lifeblood of illegal streaming. VPNs are disabled by default.

Amazon insists it’s committed to protecting intellectual property (IP) rights. It co-founded the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the world’s largest content protection coalition. It banned the sale of illicit streaming devices on its marketplace, but Sky says it has not yet gone far enough.

Nick Herm, Sky’s chief operational officer, speaking at the FT Business of Football Summit, said he wanted Amazon to “lock down or impose controls and restrictions on the use of side-loaded unofficial apps.”

​​​​​​​UEFA stance

UEFA has taken a more aggressive stance in tackling the issues. It became the first exclusive sports rights-holder to join ACE, and through ACE’s Live Tier, UEFA now participates in real-time takedowns of illegal streams, working alongside tech platforms and law enforcement.

Sky is also urging Premier League clubs to do more to address the problem. Supporting enforcement campaigns, the education of fans, applying pressure to tech platforms, and rethinking how rights are packaged and sold all form part of the plan to tackle the issue.

“[Piracy] is the number one problem of premium football,” Claire Enders of Enders Analysis, who has long warned of the ‘bubble’ in Premier League TV rights, told the FT Summit. “I don’t know of any broadcaster in Europe that is fully able to monetise sports because of piracy.”

According to broadcaster estimates and law enforcement interviews, between one-and-a-half and two million people in the UK illegally stream live sport – including Premier League matches – every week. Sky says Fire Sticks account for around 50% of Premier League piracy.

The Premier League remains the most-watched domestic football competition in the world, but the increase in piracy means that the long term picture looks uncertain, and that will make some club owners nervous. Enforcement efforts are ramping up, but questions remain over long-term accessibility, pricing, and the sustainability of the current rights model. With the next broadcast cycle already under scrutiny and question marks over just how valuable the domestic rights will be, the league faces a critical juncture.