By Leonard Agufa
NAIROBI, Kenya, July 24 – Every FIFA World Cup is a celebration of football at its finest. It captivates billions of fans, unites nations across continents, and creates moments that transcend the game itself. Yet while attention is fixed on the pitch, another contest plays out behind the scenes, one that gets far less coverage but carries equally serious consequences: the fight against digital piracy.
Sports piracy today bears little resemblance to the occasional illegal stream that frustrated broadcasters a decade ago. It has become a sophisticated global enterprise, fuelled by illegal IPTV services, social media restreams, rogue websites, and organised criminal networks. The FIFA World Cup is among its biggest targets.
The reason is simple: demand. More than five billion people engaged with the 2022 tournament across TV, digital, and social platforms. The 2026 edition, expanded to 48 teams and hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico, is on track to be the most-watched, and most illegally streamed, event in the sport’s history. Where audiences gather, piracy follows.
The financial toll is significant. Sports rights holders and service providers are estimated to lose roughly US$28 billion a year in revenue because of piracy, according to research by Synamedia and Ampere Analysis. Every illegal stream chips away at the value of broadcasting rights that fund not just the World Cup itself, but local production, technology investment, sports journalism, and jobs across the industry.
This is why piracy should not be viewed simply as a broadcaster’s problem. It is an ecosystem problem. Behind every World Cup broadcast are thousands of professionals, including camera operators, producers, engineers, commentators, analysts, and technicians working to deliver a world-class viewing experience. Broadcasters invest heavily in acquiring rights, deploying production teams, maintaining resilient infrastructure, and building the digital experiences fans now expect wherever and however they choose to watch. When that content is stolen, it weakens the commercial model that makes those investments possible in the first place.
This year’s tournament has drawn an enforcement response to match the scale of the problem. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Operation Offsides seized nearly 400 domains streaming World Cup matches without authorisation, five times the 78 domains taken down during Qatar 2022, working with FIFA, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros., and international partners. Servers were traced to Peru, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Colombia, and Croatia.
Separately, the Trustworthy Accountability Group cut off advertising revenue to nearly 1,400 pirate sites, targeting the money that keeps them running rather than just the sites themselves. Ahead of kickoff, Europol’s seven-month Operation Kratos 2 removed more than 27,000 illegal streaming URLs across 13 countries, leading to 29 arrests and the dismantling of nine organised crime groups. Investigators have also flagged a darker cost to fans: researchers found illegal streaming sites riddled with malware designed to harvest banking credentials and personal data, turning a “free” stream into a genuine security risk.
Africa is at a particularly important point in this story. Ten African nations qualified for the 2026 finals, the most ever, driving unprecedented demand for coverage across the continent. That demand is colliding with a fast-growing piracy problem of illegal IPTV subscriptions and unauthorised streaming apps spreading rapidly as broadband access expands. Industry trackers put the Middle East and Africa’s share of global IPTV subscriptions at only around 5%, even as legitimate uptake accelerates.
Enforcement is responding in kind. In South Africa, raids in Cape Town in early 2026 led to arrests of operators running illegal streaming panels with hundreds of active subscriber accounts. In Ghana, broadcasters have publicly warned pirates they will be pursued with police and customs support. Across the continent, pay-TV operators have set up real-time “war rooms” to detect and disrupt illegal streams during matches, work that broadcast executives now describe as a bigger competitive threat than any rival channel.
Addressing this challenge takes more than enforcement alone. It requires collaboration between broadcasters, technology companies, regulators, internet service providers, and law enforcement. Watermarking, AI-driven fingerprinting, and real-time monitoring are becoming essential tools for identifying and disrupting illegal streams before they reach millions of viewers. Yet enforcement still lags: independent research has found that roughly 81% of illegal live sports streams stay active throughout an event, with only a small fraction taken down within the critical first 30 minutes.
Broadcasters are also widening legal access as a way of competing with piracy directly. Some pay-TV operators have opened up premium tournament coverage to their most affordable subscription tiers for the first time, while public broadcasters in several African markets have secured free-to-air rights to World Cup matches, moves aimed at closing the price gap that often pushes fans toward illegal streams.
As football evolves, so too must the systems that protect it. The World Cup will always be remembered for moments of brilliance on the pitch. Ensuring those moments can keep being shared, invested in, and enjoyed by future generations means winning another contest altogether: the fight against digital piracy.
The writer is the Head of Operations Support at MultiChoice Kenya, a CANAL+ Company
