There's a crackdown on sports piracy – but is it already out of control?

The sports industry's lucrative business model is being undermined by dodgy TV sticks and illegal streaming links, writes Theo Leggett. There's a crackdown on sports piracy – but is it already out of control? "Football's Gone Round the Spend!" screamed The People newspaper one Sunday in July 1995. It reported breathlessly that three clubs between them were set to pay out more than £20m on new players. The highlight that summer was the transfer of Stan Collymore from Nottingham Forest to Liverpool for a British record fee of £8.5m. That number might not seem too impressive today, in an age when £100m transfers are almost commonplace. But at the time it was seismic stuff, and it symbolised the conversion of football from sport into big business.

All of this had been made possible in the early 1990s by the creation of the Premier League, and its initial TV deal with the broadcaster Sky, which paid more than £300m for five years of rights. The agreement put live top-tier football behind a TV paywall for the first time. It was a lucrative model, one that other leading championships in motorsport, rugby, golf and cricket would later seek to replicate. But now, that model is coming under pressure. Piracy has become endemic in British sports: around half of sports fans now admit