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On the evening of 21 December 2025, a football match will kick off between Morocco and Comoros in Rabat. It will be the opening game of the 35th edition of the TotalEnergies CAF African Cup of Nations (TotalEnergies CAF AFCON) tournament. The game will have an audience of millions.
There will likely be a full house of 68,000-odd fans at the Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium, but the majority of fans will watch the game via streaming and television, from across the African continent and the world.
At the previous TotalEnergies CAF AFCON tournament in 2024, the semi-final match between South Africa and Nigeria had a record-breaking audience of 10.3 million. The tournament itself had an estimated cumulative total viewership of 1.4 billion TV viewers.
The sale of broadcast rights to reach this enormous audience provides the income that makes the tournament possible. Media businesses invest billions in securing the feed for their home markets. In sub-Saharan Africa, those rights have been secured by MultiChoice, a CANAL+ company, through SuperSport, its sports broadcasting affiliate.
Beyond rights payments, media investment sustains an entire economy that runs for the duration of the month-long tournament. Film crews, accommodation, logistics, and catering are hired by broadcast teams.
Media funds football
Broadcast license fees also finance the Confederation of African Football (CAF) itself, the body that administers football on the continent. In many ways, media coverage funds football. Revenue from broadcast rights underpin the development programmes that find talent at youth level and help to nurture it.
Media income funds infrastructure that makes football possible – the fields, the kits, the match officials, the transport, the administrators. At the top level, media income funds national teams, the coaching teams, and the elite training camps, so they can attend the continental showpiece, where they carry hopes and dreams of their nations.
However, the entire football edifice is a precarious one, heavily dependent on the ability of official media partners to recoup the multi-million-dollar costs of broadcast rights. If broadcaster income from subscriptions, contracts and pay-per-view sales does not cover rights fees, then ultimately, football dies.
Only large media businesses, with the advantage of regional scale, are able to fund the costs of media sports coverage. Perversely, their business model is threatened because the same sports events they bring to their viewers are prime targets of content piracy.
Viewers might not see the harm of accessing a pirate stream, but the impact runs deep. Where a subscription paid to a legitimate rightsholder would help to fund African football, any income earned by a pirate stream goes directly to criminal syndicates in other parts of the world.
Content piracy undermines football. It robs football associations of the funding they desperately need to survive, to develop youth structures and to compete at the highest level. It’s therefore critical that sports fans understand the damage they do to the sport they supposedly love when they use pirate streams.
The impact is global. In Spain, LaLiga reported that audiovisual fraud was costing Spanish football €600 and €700-million. In the UK, the Premier League blocked more than 600,000 illegal live streams in a single season in its fight against piracy.
Pirate websites also place users at risk, exposing them to malware, hacking and identity theft, as well as unwanted pop-ups, viruses, fraud and adult content. When football content is spread across hundreds of thousands of sites, it also becomes harder to measure audiences, and makes the sport less attractive to sponsors.
Fight to save the game
Helping to fight sports piracy and keep football alive are initiatives such as Partners Against Piracy, which work to strengthen legal frameworks to prosecute pirate sites and pirate users, and to educate fans about the consequences of piracy.
Cybersecurity organisations like Irdeto harness tech and digital solutions to protect streams and track the source and the users of pirate feeds. For instance, a new innovation enables continuous renewal of authentication keys, which degrades the pirate experience and shifts users back to legal platforms.
The best partner in the fight to save football from piracy is the African public. Knowing how piracy destroys the football ecosystem empowers fans to make ethical choices in how they support their sport and makes them more likely to access games through legitimate channels.
As a fan, when you watch football content, the choice is yours: Will you be part of destroying football, or building it up? Choose wisely, the future of your sport depends on it.
