Illegal Football Streaming Takes A New Blow With This Court Decision

Illegal football streaming takes a new blow with this court decision

Last updated: 2026/01/12 at 8:01 AM

News Room Published 12 January 2026

Canal+ and its subsidiaries have just won an important battle ahead of the Paris judicial court, which ordered Google to block 19 domain names used to illegally broadcast Champions League matches. We are talking about sites like antenashop.site, daddylive3.com or even streamysport.org, platforms well known to fans of free football.

Sports rights holders understood that they had to target all possible technical intermediaries. Are internet service providers already blocking these sites? No problem, users get around these blocks with public DNS like Google’s. So now we attack these DNS directly.

Google loses across the board to the judges

Google has tried several arguments to escape this obligation. The company explained that several of these sites used Cloudflare as their content delivery network. Logically, blocking these sites at Cloudflare level would be more effective and radicalsince that would make them completely inaccessible. Except that the court didn’t want to hear anything.

Google also argued that these blockages were expensive, that they remained easy to circumvent and that they produced effects beyond French borders. Nothing happened. The court ruled that the company had not proven that these measures resulted in significant costs or technical impossibilities.

And VPNs in this story?

We’re not going to lie, the authorities are always one step behind the pirates, right? Indeed, a user who really wants to watch his match for free has dozens of solutions to get around these blocks.

The most obvious being of course the VPN. It is possible to pretend to be a connection from a foreign site and therefore, French ordinances no longer apply, it is possible to access the sites normally. VPNs cost a few euros per month, sometimes even less. Their use requires zero technical skills, you install an application, you click on a button, that’s it. Millions of French people already use them, if only to watch foreign Netflix catalogs. Suffice to say, few users will really be blocked by the French justice approach here.

The court itself recognizes this in its judgment, but the objective remains to “ stop completely » piracy activities by multiplying the obstacles. An approach which seeks to complicate life for the least experienced pirates.