MONACO: Piracy is theft, plain and simple. That’s the message Javier Tebas delivered with fire at Sportel Monaco, opening his remarks with a moral flourish: “When I was a young man I was taught not to steal because it’s a sin. This is stealing.” The LaLiga president wasn’t mincing words. He warned that illegal streaming remains one of the gravest threats to football’s future and demanded that rights holders stop being passive victims.
“Rights holders need more awareness,” Tebas urged. “Broadcasters have to work on the protection of the service.” The enemy, he explained, is growing more sophisticated by the day. Pirates are deploying increasingly advanced technology to siphon content, forcing LaLiga to respond with its own arsenal. The league is pouring investment into anti-piracy systems designed to trace and block illegal streams in real time. “Pirates are extremely advanced,” Tebas said. “We’re blocking. It is like the NASA headquarters…but we need to be able to trace them.”
The war on piracy wasn’t Tebas’s only battle. He also vented his frustration over UEFA’s reluctant approval of LaLiga’s plan to stage a match in the United States—the December 2025 fixture between Barcelona and Villarreal in Miami, Florida. “It is very frustrating,” he said of UEFA’s stance. “This is a very old-fashioned vision of professional football.”
Tebas argued that taking one league match abroad is a natural step for a global sport, not some radical betrayal of tradition. “This is just one game, not twenty,” he pointed out, before deploying a cultural counterpunch: “We accepted Halloween from the US, why don’t they accept something from us?”
But the LaLiga chief suggested there’s more lurking beneath the surface—secrets he’s saving for his memoirs. “I am going to write about it when I retire and talk about a lot of secrets,” he teased. Until then, he’ll keep fighting pirates, battling UEFA, and dragging Spanish football into the future—willing or not.
