Football live streams: How to watch games legally online

Linear TV broadcasters may soon be a thing of the past.

Year by year, the evolution in our entertainment consumption habits is having a bigger and bigger effect on the way we watch live sports. In the era of cord-cutting, sports fans worldwide are increasingly keep up to date with the latest events through the power of online streaming.

Traditional broadcasters are racing to provide online, mobile streaming options to their customers as they see their regular subscriptions dwindle, with even the most prominent rights holders of the most popular products - such as Premier League football - not immune.

GOAL investigates the current state of play in the United Kingdom and United States.

READ MORE:How to watch and live stream soccer

Soccer streams in the USA

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The US streaming markets offer a great deal of variety - and this can be good news when it comes to following soccer.

Streaming rights to major soccer leagues are split across four main platforms: Peacock, Apple TV, Paramount+ and ESPN+

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Generally speaking, if you are only interested in following one particular soccer league, there is a good chance there is a specific streaming service for you.

This isn't the case, however, for Liga MX where some games are shown across Univision's suite of channels, as well as ViX. The best streaming service for Liga MX coverage is currently DirecTV, who broadcast games on TUDN.

If you want access to multiple leagues, your best option is a service like Fubo, which offers Premier League coverage via USA Network, Champions League coverage via CBS, Liga MX coverage via Fox Deportes and other European leagues via ESPN's linear TV channels.

READ MORE:How to watch and live stream the UEFA Champions League

Football streams in the United Kingdom

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In the UK, rights to Premier League football are shared between Sky Sports and TNT Sports. This means that the only way to legally watch the English top flight live is through a subscription to their services. Most commonly, consumers buy television packages that include the Sky Sports and TNT Sports channels.

If you are one of those people, you are able to stream games shown on those channels live through their websites and apps.

Sky's range of services is known as Sky Go, and can be accessed as a web application or downloaded through Google Play and the App Store on tablets and smartphones.

TNT, meanwhile, stream their channels directly through their website, the TNT Sports app and also now through the Discovery+ app on handheld devices.

There is no legal way to stream Premier League matches for free. The same goes for La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1, MLS, the Champions League and the Europa League, among others, because Sky and TNT Sports own the rights to those competitions too.

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Occasionally, Sky or TNT will offer a game for free as a promotion. TNT, for example, streamed last season's Champions League and Europa League finals on YouTube. Sky, similarly, give away free Bundesliga matches via their YouTube channel.

If you don't want to pay for Sky or TNT, though, there are still some competitions available.

Football aired on terrestrial channels such as BBC and ITV can also be streamed for free as long as you own a TV licence. The BBC and ITV shares the rights to the FA Cup alongside TNT Sports, while Channel 4 broadcast England internationals.

All of those networks can be viewed live via their websites and apps: BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and All4.

For more obscure leagues, there is the option of using betting websites. They will often offer streams of games on which you can place bets to customers with funded accounts. One example of this is Bet365, which regularly hosts Serie A games.