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European football federation UEFA is cracking down on pirate EURO 2024 live streams, before they’ve even started. The enforcement actions show that the organization is on high alert. Meanwhile, the EU Intellectual Property Office adds support by clarifying that cheers of legitimate viewers ‘mean more’ than those from pirates.

UEFA is the international body that governs football throughout Europe.

As part of FIFA, the organization holds the rights to several major competitions and tournaments, including the Champions League and the European Championships.

These events are good for billions of euros in broadcasting rights and with these types of figures at stake, UEFA is understandably keeping a close eye on piracy. The job has become increasingly complex, now that unauthorized live-streaming is booming.

EURO 2024 Pirates

With the EURO 2024 tournament starting in Germany tomorrow, the organization and its anti-piracy partners are on high alert. Systems are in place to detect and shut down pirate streams within minutes, and social media will be heavily monitored as well.

UEFA is not the only organization preparing for the major tournament; pirates are planning ahead as well. In recent weeks, several sites have put up placeholders for the upcoming EURO 2024 matches.

These placeholders are picked up and indexed by search engines. As a result, the pirate sites are easily findable when match day comes. That is, if these pages are still in search engines by then.

According to a notice, published in the Lumen database, UEFA anti-piracy partner ‘Friend MTS’ asked the search engine to remove thousands of ‘pirate’ live-streaming links over the past week. This includes links to EURO 2024 games that are not even ‘live’ yet.

Preemptive Takedowns

The Chinese site below, for example, prepared a dedicated page for upcoming Euro 2024 live streams. After Friend MTS listed the URL in a takedown notice, Google promptly removed it. The same is true for other “EURO 2024” pirate streaming placeholders.

Google has removed most of these links from its search index. Although there is technically no copyright infringement yet, Google presumably finds it reasonable to assume that links to pirated streams will appear there eventually, as advertised.

In some cases, UEFA’s requests are rather broad. For example, one of the EURO 2024 takedowns lists a page from Leisu.com that doesn’t mention live streams. Instead, it looks more like a live score page.

According to its own website, Leisu Sports is the official ‘copyright data supplier‘ of the Chinese Football Association.

We don’t know whether Google looked into the matter in detail, but the company removed the leisu.com URL from its search results. That said, Google doesn’t simply take down every link that’s submitted.

Homepage Removals

After looking into more UEFA takedown requests from this month, including friendly matches that were played over the past days, we see many ‘homepages’ of pirate streaming sites listed. Google appears to be more reserved when it comes to such broad requests.

For example, 123koora.com, amzfutbol.com, rojadirectenvivo.me, and others are still indexed by Google, despite being listed in takedown requests.

It’s clear that UEFA will be pulling out all the stops to ensure that licensed broadcasts are properly protected. In the past, it also sent advance warnings to pirate site owners directly, but we haven’t heard similar reports this time around.

EUIPO Support

While Europe is gearing up for the Championship of the continent’s most popular sport, UEFA received some indirect support from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office.

Yesterday, EUIPO put a spotlight on the alarming sports streaming piracy rates in the EU. The press release mostly regurgitates previously published reports, but that didn’t prevent mainstream media from picking it up.

“According to EUIPO data, millions of EU citizens access or stream sports content from illegal online sources while fake sports equipment cost manufacturers €850 million per year,” EUIPO wrote.

One can wonder whether a reminder of the immense popularly of pirate live streams actually works as an advertisement to the general public, instead of a deterrent. After all, research has shown that these popularity ‘warnings’ can backfire.

EUIPO’s intentions are clear; however. It wants fans to ‘play fair’ and use legitimate viewing options, as pirate ‘cheers’ don’t pay off.