La Liga’s Tebas calls out Google over piracy
September 19, 2024
By Colin Mann
Javier Tebas, president of Spain’s top flight football competition La Liga, has described piracy as “the biggest challenge in the world of football and the sports industry in general” suggesting that Google is the main cause, accusing the search engine of not taking adequate measures to tackle the threat.
“The big problem we are currently facing, in my opinion, is that we, the victims and those of us affected, are not very clear about how to deal with the problem without knowing the situation and the actors involved very well,” Tebas told delegates at the World Football Summit in Seville.
He also suggested that companies such as Amazon and Cloudflare, as well as messaging companies such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord and Signal, where pirates could highlight their activities, were also part of the problem.
In particular, he felt that there was a serious problem with X because Elon Musk “has fired a lot of people and there is practically no one left in piracy,” suggesting that X users were illegally retransmitting content of all kinds, from all sports.
Although acknowledging that Google removes applications that provide illegal content when La Liga flagged them as pirated, he said that consumers have already downloaded them to their smartphones and would continue using them.
“Google is the main cause of the current piracy problem and is not taking the appropriate measures and is being complicit in the activity of piracy in the theft of property,” he declared.
He warned that if legislators did not take the threat seriously, a major crisis in elite sports content, in particular football, could arise in the next three years.