Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo's dramatic take on Italian football's piracy problems isn't new, likewise his insistence that only coercive action will produce results. "Football is being killed," he said in a recent interview. "However, at the end of this battle we will win. Because it's either them or us." How this will be achieved isn't clear. Pirates keep jumping to new servers and if promises are kept, fans are getting sued next.

Supported by almost constant life-or-death messaging, one has to wonder whether Serie A’s seemingly endless financial problems really are insurmountable.

Yet for reasons that aren’t easily understood, let alone explained, every week matches go ahead as planned. With decaying stadiums at some clubs and billions of euros in persistent overall debt, companies in other industries would’ve stopped spending beyond their means long ago, or at least succumbed to financial pressure while refusing to do so.

Serie A clubs have done neither, nor has the position changed on how to get finances back on track. In a recent interview with Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo published by Il Mattino (paywall), most of the league’s problems have a habit of circling back to the usual suspect; rampant IPTV piracy.

Cops and Robbers

Conflicting statements can have a tendency to unnerve creditors and if the launch of the Piracy Shield system earlier this year is any example, here’s another big one. After months of heaping praise on what was billed as the savior of Italian football, today the goal posts of opinion appear to have shifted.

“It’s like in ‘Cops and Robbers,’ we are always chasing,” said De Siervo per Il Mattino’s report. “As soon as we catch them, they move to another server.”

What that means in practical terms is unclear but after less than eight months of constantly tampering with Italy’s DNS servers, current data reveals that 5,018 IP addresses and 16,523 domain names have already been blocked with no obviously positive results.

The true scale of blocking in Italy is significantly higher. When the system began breaking down and agreed limits were exceeded recently, an unknown number of IP addresses and/or domains were removed from the system so that new ones could be added at the start of the new season. At the same time, De Siervo could be found defending the cost of season tickets, describing the price as appropriate for such a high quality product.

Take People’s Money or Pirates Will

In the UK, meanwhile, Serie A fans were unable to buy whole season passes to watch Serie A on streaming platform ‘One Football.’ Four games into the season, they still can’t.

They currently face the prospect of paying £5 for each match rather than an up-front £100 commitment for the whole season. Some pirate services, meanwhile, will accept £3 right now for an entire month of every conceivable channel, and in the time it takes to read this article, Serie A matches will be open for viewing.

Instances like these may not be typical or overly numerous, but they are more damaging than some might expect. While hardcore pirates have no qualms about resorting to piracy, the same isn’t true of those who ordinarily pay for content.

Forbidden Fruit, Not Even Once

Failing to supply legal content can provide justification for piracy and if that persists long enough for former customers to hand over a relatively small sum for an annual pirate subscription, they’re gone for at least a year.

Serie A’s strategy for converting pirates into customers seems unwavering. With assistance from the government and its prosecutors, Serie A believes that legal action is the only option, despite the inherent risks of treating all pirates the same, regardless of the circumstances.

“There is a thread of Ariadne that connects the hacker [IPTV service] with the client’s terminal: now we have to trace the end user and sanction him. The rules are there,” De Siervo said.

“A true fan does not watch a pirated match, because then he causes damage to his club. But it is a cultural issue, not linked to the price of season tickets.”

Unwavering on Piracy, Unmovable on the Solution

The statement above is likely to have zero effect on hardcore pirates; they’re regularly told they’re going to prison for their habit and not even that moves the needle of deterrence. The big question is how those with a more sensitive disposition might react, along with those currently on the fence, considering their return to legal services.

Pretending that the attraction of pirate IPTV services is always about better service would be a mistake. People who can afford to subscribe to legal services use them, just as much as those who cannot. Perhaps the former aren’t true fans while the latter desperately want to be fans but have been priced out by a sport that can’t even manage its own money. But here we are and money has to come from somewhere.

“Modern football is maintained by selling matches. We are also attacking search engines that in some ways are complicit,” De Siervo continued.

“There are, I repeat, 300 million euros of lost revenue, or 30 percent of the value of TV rights [lost to piracy]. Football is being killed like this, because there are no longer the patrons of the past who lose money, what comes in is spent.”

Serie A seems determined to reclaim this revenue by force and in many ways, targeting those who undermine a business at such scale should expect a significant response, especially if they don’t jump to a new server quickly enough, or so the reporting goes.

“We have the football we deserve and this parasitic system that doesn’t pay to watch matches must be blown up,” De Siervo insists. “Otherwise football will blow up. It’s either them or us.”

‘Us’ has to mean more than Serie A and its clubs. If this war pans out as suggested, fighting on one front while starting a war with fans on another will not end well. Fans need to played onside, like yesterday.