As the TotalEnergies CAF African Cup of Nations (AFCON) 2025 continues to grip the continent, African football is enjoying its biggest stage. Since the tournament kicked off on 21 December 2025 in Rabat with Morocco facing Comoros, packed stadiums and millions of viewers have confirmed AFCON’s place as Africa’s most powerful sporting property.
While venues like Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium fill with fans, the real audience stretches far beyond the stands. Millions more are watching matches live through television and digital platforms across Africa and globally.
At the previous TotalEnergies CAF AFCON in 2024, the South Africa versus Nigeria semi-final drew a record 10.3 million viewers. Across the tournament, cumulative TV viewership hit an estimated 1.4 billion. AFCON 2025 is tracking the same scale of attention as the group stages give way to higher-stakes football.
Broadcast rights are the financial engine behind AFCON. Media companies invest billions of dollars to secure the right to deliver matches to fans in their home markets. In sub-Saharan Africa, those rights are held by MultiChoice, a CANAL+ company, through SuperSport.
Beyond rights payments, media investment sustains an entire economy that runs for the duration of the month-long tournament. Film crews, accommodation, logistics, and catering are hired by broadcast teams.
Media funds football
Broadcast license fees also finance the Confederation of African Football (CAF) itself, the body that administers football on the continent. In many ways, media coverage funds football. Revenue from broadcast rights underpin the development programmes that find talent at youth level, and help to nurture it.
Media income funds infrastructure that makes football possible – the fields, the kits, the match officials, the transport, the administrators. At the top level, media income funds national teams, the coaching teams, and the elite training camps, so they can attend the continental showpiece, where they carry hopes and dreams of their nations.
However, the entire football structure is a precarious one, heavily dependent on the ability of official media partners to recoup the multi-million-dollar costs of broadcast rights. If broadcaster income from subscriptions, contracts and pay-per-view sales does not cover rights fees, then ultimately, football dies.
Only large media businesses, with the advantage of regional scale, are able to fund the costs of media sports coverage. Perversely, their business model is threatened because the same sports events they bring to their viewers are prime targets of content piracy.
Viewers might not see the harm of accessing a pirate stream, but the impact runs deep. Where a subscription paid to a legitimate rightsholder would help to fund African football, any income earned by a pirate stream goes directly to criminal syndicates in other parts of the world.
Content piracy undermines football. It robs football associations of the funding they desperately need to survive, to develop youth structures and to compete at the highest level. It’s therefore critical that sports fans understand the damage they do to the sport they supposedly love when they use pirate streams.
The impact is global. In Spain, LaLiga reported that audiovisual fraud was costing Spanish football €600 and €700-million. In the UK, the Premier League blocked more than 600,000 illegal live streams in a single season in its fight against piracy.
Pirate websites also place users at risk, exposing them to malware, hacking and identity theft, as well as unwanted pop-ups, viruses, fraud and adult content. When football content is spread across hundreds of thousands of sites, it also becomes harder to measure audiences, and makes the sport less attractive to sponsors.
Fight to save the game
Helping to fight sports piracy and keep football alive are initiatives such as Partners Against Piracy, which work to strengthen legal frameworks to prosecute pirate sites and pirate users, and to educate fans about the consequences of piracy.
Cybersecurity organisations like Irdeto harness tech and digital solutions to protect streams and track the source and the users of pirate feeds. For instance, a new innovation enables continuous renewal of authentication keys, which degrades the pirate experience and shifts users back to legal platforms.
The best partner in the fight to save football from piracy is the African public. Knowing how piracy destroys the football ecosystem empowers fans to make ethical choices in how they support their sport and makes them more likely to access games through legitimate channels.
As a fan, when you watch football content, the choice is yours: Will you be part of destroying football, or building it up? Choose wisely, the future of your sport depends on it.
