Report: UK pirate sport streams up 100% in 3 years
January 15, 2026
The number of illegal streams of sports event in Britain has more than doubled to 3.6 billion in the past three years according to a report from The Campaign for Fairer Gambling (CFG).
The CFG’s 2024-25 report also highlights that there is a symbiotic relationship between sports piracy and unlicensed gambling, with 89 per cent of illegal streams in this country featuring adverts for black-market bookmakers.
The report claims illegal betting has exploded over the past four years with unlicensed operators earning £379 million (€436m) in the first half of 2025, giving them 9 per cent of Britain’s £8.2 billion online gambling marketplace, a significant increase on their 2 per cent market share in 2022.
The number of illegal streams has grown from 1.8 billion in 2022 to 3.6bn last year according to the CFG report, which was produced by the online marketplace intelligence platform Yield Sec. In comparison a Yield Sec report on the US market for 2024 identified 4.2 billion streams of sports events in a far bigger country, with the prevalence of illegal streaming around four times bigger in the UK.
Derek Webb, Founder and Funder of CFG, said: “Great Britain is becoming a soft touch. We have allowed the global soft power of GB sports to be infected by organized criminality. Online gambling operators were irrationally permitted to stay offshore under the flawed 2005 Gambling Act. This acceptance of offshoring enabled the theoretical excuse to justify black market operations.”
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