Chema Alonso's double betrayal: from advisor to the Referees Committee to working for LaLiga's greatest enemy.

In the eyes of Javier Tebas , LaLiga president Chema Alonso has just committed a double betrayal. After announcing that he would be collaborating with the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) as an external advisor, an organization linked to the Spanish Federation (RFEF) with which Tebas has already had his share of disagreements, he finally resigned from his position following his move to Cloudflare, a security, service identifier, and cloud computing provider that the LaLiga president considers his greatest enemy in the fight against piracy.

"More than 50% of the pirate IPs that distribute LaLiga content illegally are laundered by Cloudflare and, despite LaLiga having made multiple requests to the company to cease its collaboration with pirate sites, Cloudflare has chosen not to collaborate and profit from the criminal activity it helps cover up," the organization said on February 15 through a statement in which it also accused Cloudflare of collaborating "with illegal activities such as pimping, prostitution, pornography, marketing of counterfeit goods, fraud and scams, among others."

The mechanism used by LaLiga to combat piracy over the last few months of the competition—mass IP blocking, primarily with the help of Telefónica, a company where Alonso himself held various cybersecurity-related positions from 2016 until early 2025—can be compared a bit to killing flies with a cannon. It can be very effective, yes, but it also takes out things that have nothing to do with it.

Cloudfare's response

Without going any further, one of the websites affected by this strategy last March was the website of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). Furthermore, there are several tools that allow more or less advanced users to bypass these IP blocks.

Cloudflare, on the other hand, has already filed appeals with the Constitutional Court and the European Commission, arguing that these blocks, in its view, are completely indiscriminate. And not only that. In addition to all this, it has also developed multiple technologies designed to protect user privacy, theoretically in the name of safeguarding net neutrality, which in turn hinders the spread of illegal content.