With upwards of 50% of all sports fans habitually accessing unlawful streaming services, sports piracy is widespread worldwide.
Football is especially problematic. It is one of the most pirated sports that opens the door for fans of other sports to also become streaming pirates.
This is concerning for the official streaming websites, given that the World Cup is being watched by millions of pirates.
For a country like America, this is the first time such an incredibly large audience is watching the beautiful game, which means illegal watching is at an all-time high.
Considering this, it comes as no surprise that American law enforcement officials appear to have blocked some of the most famous football streaming piracy web addresses currently in use. One of these websites is, or rather, ‘was’ HesGoal.
Over the course of this year, HesGoal has become one of the fan streaming sites with the highest usage rates. The application was created ten years ago and is still used by many individuals pretty well. The platform has more than 40 million visitors each month, according to a report.
Unfortunately, those who like to watch the game for free today witnessed something rather different. The viewers saw a seizure banner that warned individuals seeking to view the website of possible federal legal action.
The name servers for the domains were pointing to SEIZEDSERVERS.COM. The US Department of Justice controls these nameservers, which are frequently used to block websites as part of legal procedures.
Although the domain seizures have not yet been verified, it seems like a concerted strike on sports streaming websites. In addition to HesGoal, inaccessible websites included score808.com, freestreams-live1.com, 9goaltv.cc, and istream2watch.com.
As is expected, the fans were mourning the loss of an all-time great website.
The confiscation is clearly a big setback for the sites, the majority of which receive millions of users each month, but all hope is not lost just yet. It is unlikely that these websites would remain offline.
For instance, Stream2watch has already migrated to istream2watch.stream and is still viewable. Similar comebacks may also be made by other websites.
The topic of greater concern here is why exactly people feel the need to flock to websites like these, and the answer for that is quite simple – It is becoming extremely expensive to continue watching matches.
For a normal PL season in the UK, fans need to buy the minimum £41 a month Sky Sports bundle, alongside the £15 month for BT sports. On top of this, with the new Amazon Prime deal that the Premier League has, the cost of having a Prime account also needs to be factored in.
With all of this being an almost necessity for an average fan, it makes absolute economic sense for a user to just pirate the content for free instead. On top of that, pirated content is a lot more easily accessible. Make it make sense.
For now, we can hold out hope that HesGoal will return. Till then, a plethora of websites are still available to do the job.
