Firstly, some of the language in that article is way over the top. It sounds like it was pre-prepared by a FACT spokesperson, with all the usual scaremongering bullshit, then signed off by a BBC sub-editor.

Football needs to take a lesson from the music industry. Piracy is a service issue. If the Premier League released a streaming app and said, "right, you pay 20 quid a month and you get every game", the majority of people would happily sign up (except Sludge, of course). As it is, you need multiple subscriptions to multiple providers (all of which are way overpriced), and even then the majority of games are not available for broadcast. So you have people pirating either because it's the only way to watch the games they want to see, or because the extortionate greed of the broadcasters has priced them out.

Because that's what it is: greed. I live abroad, and the costs for full access to PL, CL, all the top leagues (plus all the other top sports) is about a tenth of what it costs in the UK. I'm sure many of the posters here who live abroad would say the same.

This isn't a battle the PL or Sky Sports will win. There will always be a way to pirate and stream matches, no matter how many people they go after or how ludicrously heavy handed the sentences are (rapists and paedophiles get shorter sentences ffs). The only way they will seriously crack down on piracy is to do what the music industry has done, and stop taking the piss out of people.

10 quid a month for football, or 100+ quid a month: both of those prices are robbery, for very different reasons.