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 to using what they might euphemistically call "alternative" means to watch paywalled material, according to the consultancy Ampere Analysis.

A third man, from Merseyside, received a suspended 32-month sentence in August for similar offences. Several pubs have been fined thousands of pounds for screening matches illegally.

There is a great deal at stake. The Premier League alone is a sporting monster. In its most recent deal, it sold its viewing rights to domestic audiences for £6.7bn over four years, with almost as much coming from foreign rights. Armed with bundles of TV cash, clubs have been able to attract the finest players in the world. That in turn has given the league a major international profile.

Although football has been the main beneficiary of paid-for TV in the UK, other competitions such as Formula One, Six Nations rugby and the Wimbledon tennis championships have also commanded very high fees for selling exclusive rights. Live sport on free-to-air television has become increasingly rare.

Yet that wealth could be threatened by a surge in piracy and illegal viewing. The practice is most common among younger, digital-native audiences, who each year become a larger and larger share of sports fans. But many older viewers also seem comfortable with it.

"For 18 to 34-year-olds, it's over 70% who admit to doing this regularly," says Daniel Monaghan, a researcher at Ampere Analysis. "Over half of 35 to 44s admit to doing it, and about a third of those aged 45 to 64."

This year's Champions League final went behind a paywall in the UK for the first time in more than 30 years. Viewers were asked to pay at least £4.99 to watch it, prompting a backlash, including from the then-prime minister, Arsenal fan Sir Keir Starmer.

Many simply refused to pay: 3.7 million IP addresses accessed illegal streams of the match in the UK, according to research carried out by the Gaming Compliance International consultancy, on behalf of the Guardian newspaper. That compared to around seven million people who watched it legally in the UK.

"What it comes down to is the financial side - that's the big one - and ease of access as well," he says. "Getting every single game will cost you hundreds of pounds a year."

Meanwhile the streams he uses are free, with links readily obtainable on social media.

But there's another issue, he says: the famous blackout. Games taking place between 14:45 and 17:15 on a Saturday are not usually screened live in the UK, a decades-old policy designed to protect crowds at lower league matches. But broadcasters outside the UK can and do show those matches, fuelling pirated streams.

Those searching for pirated material have plenty of options. Streaming links, along with advice on how to avoid their pitfalls, are freely available in online discussion groups. These links, used by Kiran and his friends, have practical downsides – such as frequent buffering or poor quality, or platforms that disappear without warning. In some cases, they can also be used to bombard viewers with explicit ads for porn sites.

Many people prefer to access illegal content with a streaming device, such as an Amazon Fire Stick, a pocket-sized gadget that plugs into a TV. The sticks are legitimate products, but they can also be "sideloaded" with unauthorised software, allowing pirates to mimic the output of legitimate outlets by offering packages of selected channels.

A third option for illicit viewing is to use a virtual private network, or VPN, which effectively allows your computer to pretend it's in a different country, one in which access to sports programming is cheaper than it is in the UK (or totally free).

Earlier this year, the Sports Industry Group found that 58% of fans surveyed considered illegal streaming to be socially acceptable.

That may be because viewers have simply come to resent the amount of money they are expected to pay.

As the government's Intellectual Property Office puts it, "a main driver of illegal content access is the perception of unfair or high pricing for legal services".

According to a recent report by WPI Economics, illegal sports streaming costs the broadcasting industry about £700m each year.

At a conference last year, Tom Burrows, the head of global rights at the sports streaming platform DAZN, described piracy as a "huge problem" for his company, and "almost a crisis for the sports rights industry".

Even though DAZN paid a reported €100m (£85m) to end the contract (along with outstanding rights fees worth another €140m), its departure created a hole in the French league's finances. It was left to set up its own streaming service, and the amount of broadcast income fell from roughly €700m per year to €412m this season, according to figures compiled by football-finance.com.

For a European powerhouse like Paris St Germain, with plenty of other revenue sources, this probably matters little. But for smaller teams it has been a serious problem. Angers SCO, a club in the west of France, said last year the affair had cost it €30m over two seasons, and forced it to sell its striker Estéban Lepaul.

It's unlikely that a competition on the scale of the Premier League would lose its broadcaster. But piracy could ultimately limit how much they will be willing to pay in future.

Daniel Monaghan of Ampere thinks piracy "is at the very least a significant constraint on the sports rights models that have been highly lucrative for broadcasters and rights holders over the last 30 years".

If left unchecked, he thinks this will make it harder for rights holders to generate a return on their investments.

At best this could hamper future growth. At worst it could lead to falling revenues over time, hitting the sports that have benefitted most from the wave of TV money.

In the case of the Premier League, this might just mean fewer blockbuster transfers - but it could also reduce the sum the League gives to the wider football game, from grassroots upwards, which amounted to £1.6bn over the three years to 2025.

Nick Sumner, the organisation's investigations manager, insists piracy is not a victimless crime. "Organised crime is behind this, and they want to make money by any means possible," he explains.