Entertainment & Sports Broadcasting Heavyweights On How To Defeat Piracy: “It’s A Deadly Serious Issue” — IMG-RedBird Summit

As the value of sports rights grows, the battle over piracy will intensify, and it’s one war the broadcasting world has to win.

That was the sentiment yesterday at the IMG-RedBird Summit during a number of panels with top figures from the world of entertainment and sports yesterday.

In a morning session at the Soho Farmhouse event in the UK, Javier Tebas, President of Spain’s top division La Liga, said the main challenge for soccer is “piracy and audio visual fraud.”

“It’s been going on for years, but for last three seasons, the growth in piracy is incredible,” he added. “I spend 70% working day fighting against audiovisual fraud. If, hypothetically, we got rid of 90% of piracy there’d be sufficient money for everyone.”

Tebas warned that sports federations, who sell rights to their events and tournaments to broadcasters and streamers have not taken the issue “as seriously as it should be.” He quoted statistics that one in every three people watch sport without paying for it in Spain. The number was higher in France (“one in two”), Africa and Latin America (both “60%”).

“If they were to pay 30% of this, we’d have money to solve lots of things in the football world,” he said. “The industry we’ve created is based on broadcast rights, so this is the biggest challenge we have.”

La Liga is home to the likes of UEFA Champions League holders Real Madrid, Barcelona and Athletico Madrid, and is considered the second-most watched soccer league in the world behind the English Premier League by most analyses.

Dan Rossomondo, Chief Commercial Officer of Dorna Sports, which holds rights to motorcycling competitions, agreed with Tebas later in the day, saying broadcast deals are “the lifeblood of our business, so piracy is a deadly serious issue.”

“You have to use all the levers possible to try to get people come to the authorized channel sport, butwhen you have a global sport that goes to different marketplaces, it’s different municipalities, different governments, so it’s not an easy problem to solve. Maybe if we continue to address it collectively, it’ll be a lot easier.”

Sally Bolton, CEO of All England Lawn Tennis Club, which stages the Wimbledon tennis Grand Slam event, said: “The issue with piracy is it isn’t something that sport can just tackle on its own. No individual sport can tackle it on its own, nor can sport as a sector tackle it on its own. Part of the challenge is bringing that coalition together to try and tackle the problem on a global level. That is not easy.”