Spain’s top football body, La Liga, has spent much of 2026 ordering the country’s internet providers to block IP addresses linked to pirated match streams, and the collateral damage keeps piling up.
As first reported by Euronews, the weekly blocking campaign has knocked hundreds of thousands of unrelated websites offline along with the streams it is meant to stop.
The scale is substantial. La Liga blocks more than 550 IP addresses on an average matchday, and reported over 7,441 addresses blocked across 36 different internet providers in the first half of 2026 alone.
Because so many unrelated websites share hosting infrastructure with the pirate streams, internet monitoring group OONI estimates more than 554,000 legitimate domains have been caught up in the process, with reported losses to affected businesses passing €3.1 million.
Cloudflare has borne a disproportionate share of the fallout. Despite hosting only around 30 percent of the blocked IP addresses, Cloudflare accounts for roughly 90 percent of the domains affected, over 501,000 of them, simply because so many websites share its infrastructure.
Euronews reports that government portals, courts, universities, NGOs including Amnesty International and UNICEF, a major payment gateway, and even some football clubs’ own websites have all been wrongly blocked at one point or another.
Many Spanish users have responded by turning to VPNs to work around the disruption, and La Liga has taken direct aim at VPN providers as a result.
Spain’s Commercial Court of Córdoba has previously issued interim measures against VPN providers, and earlier rulings this year classified services including NordVPN as “technological intermediaries” with blocking obligations of their own, a decision NordVPN has been contesting through the Spanish courts.
The current court order runs until 20th June 2027, the final day of the 2026/27 season, so the dispute has a long way still to run.
None of this changes anything for UK based VPN users directly, since the court orders apply to Spanish ISPs rather than VPN infrastructure elsewhere.
It is, however, a useful case study for anyone who relies on a VPN while travelling in Spain, or who wants to understand what happens when a country’s blocking regime gets applied at the IP address level rather than to individual pirate sites.
VPNCompare’s guide to the best VPN for Spain covers the providers worth considering for anyone heading there.
Readers wanting a VPN with a strong record on reliability and a transparent history of handling exactly this kind of legal pressure may want to look at ExpressVPN, VPNCompare’s top rated pick, covered in full in its ExpressVPN review.
La Liga maintains that IP blocking remains necessary despite the disruption, arguing that pirated streams cost the league hundreds of millions of euros a year, while Cloudflare and digital rights groups continue to argue that blunt IP level blocking causes far more harm than it prevents.
With the current order in place for another nine months, Spanish users and the businesses caught in the crossfire are likely to keep feeling the effects every weekend a match is played.
