LaLiga asks the EU to put NordVPN, Proton, ExpressVPN and Surfshark on its piracy list

Spanish football league LaLiga has asked the European Commission to put NordVPN, Proton VPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark on its 2027 Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. TorrentFreak reported on the 14-page submission on September 30. The league's complaint is not about the technology but about affiliate marketing, which it says takes the services beyond being "neutral technical intermediaries".

The Commission publishes the list every two years after a public consultation. It names websites and marketplaces that rights holders have reported. The 2025 edition included no VPN services, but it did list hosting providers, the IPFS network, game repacker FitGirl and domain registrar Njalla. If LaLiga gets its way, VPNs would appear on the list for the first time.

What the league accuses the services of

"The conduct that takes these services beyond neutral technical provision is the deliberate marketing of circumvention, conducted at arm's length through affiliate programmes," the submission says. The league describes two kinds of material. The first is guides, updated for the 2026/27 season, on watching matches for free or cheaply through foreign broadcasts by connecting to a server in another country. The second is pages that name pirate streaming sites and explain how a VPN gets around court-ordered blocking. The authors of such pages rank the services, link to discounted subscriptions and earn a commission on sales.

The submission gives no specific examples or links. TorrentFreak found several Spanish-language guides for the new season on its own that recommend connecting to foreign servers for free broadcasts. The league also argues that some review sites are not independent: within one corporate group, VPN rankings share an owner with the services they rank. TorrentFreak says this refers to the vpnMentor site and Kape Technologies, which owns several VPN services. The submission ends with a disclaimer that it "does not assert any finding of legal liability" against the companies named.

What the courts have decided so far

The league's fight with VPNs is not new. On February 17 a commercial court in Córdoba, without hearing the defendants, ordered Proton VPN and NordVPN to block pirate streams, finding that the services advertise geo-restriction bypassing with reference to the match calendar. In May the same court refused to fine NordVPN, and the main case continues. On July 9 the EU Court of Justice ruled in case C-788/24 that VPN providers are not liable when users get around geo-blocking.

Our reading is that this is why the league has moved from the technology to the advertising: the complaint is about how the services are sold, not how they work. Whether the Commission will add VPNs to the 2027 list is unknown. The list itself fines no one and blocks nothing, but rights holders use it as an argument in court and in talks with authorities in other countries. Proton VPN and the industry group VPN Trust Initiative did not answer TorrentFreak's questions before publication.

In the same submission LaLiga also targets AFTVnews's Downloader app for Fire TV and Android TV. The league counted 341 short download codes in it, 262 of which it says lead to pirate apps. AFTVnews says the codes are created by users through its URL shortener.