48 teams, 104 matches, 39 days. The 2026 World Cup is the biggest ever organised. For millions of fans, it is also the most expensive to watch legally – and the cheapest to pirate. A VPN subscription costing €3.97 a month is all it takes to access BBC iPlayer from your sofa in Luxembourg and watch the entire tournament in high definition, for free. No legal risk. No malware. Without even feeling like you’re doing anything illegal.
This is the stark contrast that Fifa fails to mention in its press releases. On the one hand, $5.3bn in TV rights. On the other, a workaround so simple, so cheap and so widely publicised that it has become the de facto first choice for tens of millions of fans. Its partner broadcasters are watching part of the audience evaporate before kick-off.
A few days before the start of the tournament, Europol had released the results of Operation Kratos 2, a seven-month investigation conducted jointly with the Bulgarian Directorate-General for Combating Organised Crime. The results: 29 arrests, 148 searches, 86 suspects identified, nine criminal networks dismantled and more than 27,000 illegal streaming links removed. The authorities identified a total of over 720,000 counterfeit items. The operation involved police forces from thirteen countries, including Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, but not Luxembourg. UEFA, La Liga, beIN Media Group and several companies specialising in content protection provided technical intelligence throughout the investigation. Kratos 2 is the direct follow-up to Operation Kratos 1, launched during Euro 2024.
Nearly 900 million in prize money
What the investigators dismantled was not a network of tech-savvy film buffs sharing links on forums. By 2026, illegal sports streaming had become a mature underground ecosystem combining cybercrime, malware distribution, personal data theft, financial fraud and large-scale monetisation networks. In Italy, a parallel operation carried out just hours before the tournament began uncovered a fully-fledged commercial network: pirated subscriptions sold for between €10 and €40 a month, including customer service, with access to Sky, DAZN, Netflix and Disney+ included in the package. The funds collected were laundered through investments in the legitimate economy and cryptocurrencies. Four Italian nationals have been charged with copyright infringement and self-laundering.
The financial stakes are as high as the police presence. These TV rights, worth 5.3 billion, account for 40% of a total budget of 13 billion dollars for the 2023–2026 cycle, a 72% increase compared to Qatar – which Gianni Infantino sums up in his own words: “104 Super Bowls in a month.” In the United States, Fox holds the English-language rights for around $480m; Telemundo, for Spanish-language broadcasting, has signed a contract worth close to $465m. Together, the two networks are projecting $850 million in advertising revenue. Asia-Pacific accounts for over $700m in combined rights fees, South America around $360m. This model is based on a simple equation: broadcasters pay substantial sums for exclusivity and recoup their investment through subscriptions and advertising revenue. Piracy undermines both sides of this equation simultaneously.
Where does this money go? Partly to the teams: the total prize money for this tournament stands at $871 million, a 49% increase on the Qatar edition. The winners will pocket $50m; even the first team to be knocked out of the tournament will walk away with over $10m. But the bulk of the budget – nearly $3.9bn over the cycle – is redistributed to the 211 member associations via the Fifa Forward programme: pitches, youth academies, grants in markets overlooked by commercial football. It is this mechanism that piracy is quietly eroding. Every match watched outside official channels represents a fraction of rights revenue that will not be renegotiated upwards in the next cycle – and a fraction of funding that will not reach a federation in sub-Saharan Africa or Central Asia.
Hackers are more agile than the authorities
In France, the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) has estimated the loss of revenue resulting from the illegal streaming of sports content at €300m per year for the sports sector. Added to this are €420m in lost tax and social security revenue for the State — a direct consequence of a parallel economy that escapes all regulation. In 2025, Arcom blocked 6,496 domain names linked to unauthorised broadcasts, a 71% increase on the previous year. Since 2022, the cumulative total has exceeded 12,600 blocks in France. The increase is structural: for every domain blocked, pirate operators switch to an alternative domain within a few hours.
Demand, however, shows no sign of abating. According to the Arcom survey published in May 2025, nearly one in five French people aged 15 and over reported having watched at least one live sports event via an illegal channel during 2024. This figure has remained stable since late 2023, meaning that the increase in blocking measures has not yet had a measurable deterrent effect on behaviour. During the OM-PSG Clasico in October 2024, an Ipsos study commissioned by the Association for the Protection of Sports Programmes found that 55% of viewers had watched the match illegally. For Ligue 1, the consequences are directly quantifiable: Nicolas de Tavernost, CEO of LFP Media, told the Senate Culture Committee in May 2026 that piracy had cost Ligue 1+, the Professional Football League’s streaming platform, €100m during its first season of operation.
The overall estimates are staggering, although they need to be viewed within their methodological context. A study carried out by Synamedia in partnership with Ampere Analysis, published in March 2021 and entitled “Pricing Piracy: The Value of Action”, estimated that rights holders and broadcasters worldwide lose or could potentially recoup $28.3bn a year in revenue. This estimate, based on a survey of more than 6,000 sports fans across ten countries, predates the explosion of IPTV and the increased fragmentation of rights across platforms: it therefore likely represents a floor rather than a ceiling. The same study found that 74% of users of illegal streams said they would be willing to switch to a legal service if it were accessible and if pirated streams became less reliable.
Dynamic pricing is sending ticket prices soaring
The reality that these figures struggle to capture is even simpler. A subscription to a virtual private network — a VPN — costs less than four euros a month with the market’s leading providers, such as NordVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark, all of which are heavily advertised on mainstream platforms. With just a few clicks, any internet user based in Luxembourg or France can simulate a connection from the UK and freely access BBC iPlayer or ITV Hub, which are streaming the entire tournament without any subscription fees. Using a VPN is not illegal in Europe. It does not download anything, install any malware or fund any criminal network. It simply exploits the geographical fragmentation of TV rights — the very same fragmentation that broadcasters have built and defended as a business model. In other words, the market has found the solution to piracy — the one the industry refused to provide — cleanly and legally.
This approach of maximising revenue is not limited to broadcasting rights. For the first time in its history, Fifa has introduced dynamic pricing for tickets this year — much like airlines do. The lowest price has remained affordable, at $60. The top end, however, has skyrocketed: a ticket for the final was trading for over $32,000 on the secondary market in May. Victor Matheson, a sports economist at Holy Cross University, sums up the contradiction: the asset that makes TV rights so valuable is the universality of football. Making the stadium and the screen inaccessible threatens precisely that.
La Liga president Javier Tebas put it bluntly at Sportel Monaco 2025: watching all of a Champions League team’s matches in Spain now costs over €1,000 per season, a sum that the fragmentation of rights between Canal+, DAZN, Amazon Prime and beIN Sports makes difficult for the average fan to avoid. If all users currently watching pirated content were to subscribe to a legal service, the price of that service would automatically fall, according to this argument. The question is which of the federations, broadcasters and platforms would be willing to give up their share to make this possible.
The 2026 World Cup, with its 104 matches spread across 16 host cities in three countries, highlights the contradictions of the system on a large scale. In the UK, the BBC and ITV are broadcasting the entire tournament free of charge; in Malaysia, broadcaster Astro has relinquished the rights after 20 years, deeming the investment economically unviable in the face of rising rights costs and increasing piracy. Operation Kratos 2 shut down 27,000 illegal links. On Thursday evening in Mexico City, whilst Raúl Jiménez scored Mexico’s second goal to the cheers of the Azteca crowd, others were opening up elsewhere.
