Javier Tebas has an unwavering mission as president of LaLiga since 2013: to make the Spanish league a global product that is always modern, successful and sustainable. To achieve this, he has a non-negotiable approach: that no one is unduly left with the proceeds of this management in the whole line of generation of an appealing content, with high standards of creativity and production and largely desired in all markets.

Therefore, in all its presentations, the concepts of global expansion and the fight against piracy go hand in hand. It is a discursive pendulum with examples, data, numbers and a remarkable passion for understanding the new generations and grasping the winds of the trends that are emerging. Sports Summit São Paulo 2024 was no exception.

Tebas took center stage at Sports Summit in a conversation with Bruno Rodrigues of CNN Brazil. One of the topics addressed was the task of international expansion that is a trademark of LaLiga: “Eight years ago we made the decision to internationalize LaLiga, but it is a project that is always alive. LaLiga is present all over the world and with digitalization that presence is not only through networks, but also with OTT platforms. Markets such as the United States and Canada are places where soccer is popular, especially with the Latinos who live there. And it also has the development of the audiovisual market with the main companies that mark the evolution of the media,” said Tebas.

This LaLiga season is the first of the alliance with EA Sports following a historic sponsorship agreement with Santander. LaLiga and EA Sports announced this sponsorship a year before its starting lineup because it was a partnership that crossed the usual boundary of what a sports organization and a brand generate when they knot an alliance.

“The new LaLiga brand reflects the changes in today’s society. I don’t mean more modern, but more current. EA Sports represents the technology of today’s society and our new image is a reflection of what society is like now,” said Tebas in Sao Paulo. With this new LaLiga identity already established, it is interesting to revisit the statements made by Javier Tebas when, in September 2023, he was talking to reporter Pablo Giralt (TNT Sports – Directv) at the Sports Summit Leaders in Buenos Aires.

At that time, Tebas gave the right context to the agreement with Electronic Arts: a partnership that goes beyond traditional marketing because it also seeks to discover new ways of broadcasting matches in order to provide better experiences: “Three years ago, video games sought to be very similar to broadcasts. Now, we are going the other way around. We are working on a new novelty in which, in addition to being able to watch the matches live on the game consoles, if you are an EA FC player, you will be able to finish the play live as you would do it and not as it actually happened. The agreement with EA Sports is not only a sponsorship agreement, but also a technological partnership”.

Sports Summit São Paulo had several panels that gave examples of the crossover between traditional sports and gaming. New forms of transmission and formats. Other ways to connect with audiences. Tebas has some data on what’s to come: “In 2030 80 percent of sports will go by streaming. That’s what the studies say. We have to move towards that, which at the same time means moving towards a more fragmented offer than before and that also means being more attentive to audiovisual fraud”.
This is where Javier Tebas attacks like a bull in the ring. Without concessions, he has the exact pulse of how content piracy unfolds, which has led LaLiga to build its own tools to detect that fraud and see to it that the owners of those rights do not lose money (and it is a lot of money) from illegal transmissions: according to its own data, LaLiga in 2022 estimated its losses from pirate transmissions through apps, social networks and other platforms at €500 million.

“We know in real time where are the points and servers where illegal content is hosted. Those of LaLiga, the Premier League, Netflix, everything…There are daily 45 thousand points of distribution of illegal content,” Tebas points out. For the LaLiga president, the tech giants are not doing everything they could do to prevent these (bad) practices. “Google and Apple are not collaborating much. In Apple Store they remove illegal apps, but they take 10 days and in that time there are hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads. A lot of money is lost. In August alone we detected 800,000 pirate apps for downloading soccer on Android”.

Tebas even hopes that in the coming years it will be possible to go even further with the anti-piracy protocols with a very difficult objective to achieve: that the smartphone manufacturers themselves intervene in the matter to prevent these illegal applications from remaining on the phones and that they manage to be deleted in the same movement.

He does not disguise the fact that he is capable of going all out to ensure that no one benefits from LaLiga’s income in an undue manner. Nor does he disguise a desire in the same direction: that Real Madrid wins the Champions League and see Vinicius Jr and Mbappé in action together in the next championship. An asset that will help LaLiga become much more global than it already is.