Our take on La Liga's decision to close its streaming platform LaLiga+
LaLiga to close LaLiga+ streaming platform
LaLiga’s decision to shut down LaLiga+ might look like the end of a failed streaming experiment. But beneath the surface, it reflects something more interesting about how leagues are rethinking the role of D2C platforms, shared infrastructure and media strategy.
Simão van Zeller and Tom Grindell explore why LaLiga+ should be seen less as a standalone product and more as a strategic tool.
Our Take:
On paper, LaLiga+ closing at the end of June looks like a retreat. A major league built a streaming platform, ran it for nearly a decade, and is now walking away. Easy read: D2C is hard, leagues shouldn't try. We don't read it that way and neither do we at LaSource.
What made LaLiga+ unique: LaLiga+ was distinctive in its category as it was a multi-sport platform. The core football content was supplemented with handball, futsal, basketball, volleyball and gymnastics - competitions that had little broadcast visibility and no real way to build their own streaming infrastructure at the time of launch. The idea was that by sharing the costs and the platform, these sports could get in front of audiences they'd never otherwise reach, whilst also giving the platform incremental content to fill calendar gaps of the core product.
In 2020, that hypothesis made a lot of sense. The reason it's ending in 2026 is that those sports are now able to build their own platforms, their own channels and their own audiences. The cost of content and streaming has dropped significantly, tools that used to require a broadcaster's budget are now accessible to challenger federations. If you interpret the objectives of the platform as shared infrastructure rather than a standalone product, it did what it was supposed to do.
The most important success metric: LaLiga recently secured over €6.1 billion in domestic revenue for the next cycle, a 9% uplift over the previous deal. Having a functioning D2C platform completely changes the dynamics of a rights negotiation, as broadcasters know you have a feasible alternative to distribute your content.
The same logic applies internationally. LaLiga+ was a testing ground in markets where LaLiga had no broadcast deal and no visibility. Running an OTT in those markets builds audience data, and that data matters when you’re trying to convince a broadcaster to take a deal. It's worth asking whether some of those dark markets are now licensed territories partly because LaLiga could show up to the conversation with actual numbers. A good example of that testing bed is what the Premier League is doing in Singapore with their D2C platform.
Two questions that are worth debating:
1. What does the right D2C experiment look like for each league?
A lot of the conversation around league streaming platforms focuses on subscriber numbers and whether they can compete with Netflix or DAZN, which we feel is the wrong frame for most leagues. The more useful question is what role a D2C platform plays in your broader strategy - as a negotiating tool, a data source and a way into markets you don't yet understand. LaLiga's answer was multi-sport shared infrastructure, whereas another league's answer will be completely different.
2. Where does the centralisation logic go from here?
LaLiga+ was built on the idea that one platform could serve multiple sports under one roof which worked given the market forces of the time it was operating in. But now the question shifts: what should still be shared and what should each property own for itself? Things like data infrastructure, tech and monetisation can make sense to pool, but only with the right partners, where incentives are aligned. But the editorial voice and the fan experience usually need to stay with the individual property. We're seeing this play out with a league we're working with who started with centralised back-end infrastructure across their clubs and are now exploring whether that deal could scale to all major sports federations in the country.
What can other leagues take from this?
LaLiga+ helped smaller sports get on screens, gave LaLiga a stronger hand in rights negotiations and opened up markets that had no broadcast footprint. Now the context has changed and LaLiga will evolve again.
What's worth remembering is that this kind of cross-sport collaboration is possible when everyone's clear on what they're getting out of it. LaLiga+ worked because the incentives across the sports were aligned: shared costs, shared platform and shared visibility.
Every league's version of this will look different: different sports, different markets, different starting points. The D2C strategy that makes sense for one league won't look anything like what made sense for LaLiga and that's the bit we find most interesting at LaSource. It's where we spend a lot of our time with the leagues we work with - helping them figure out what their version looks like.
LaSource exists to help those shaping the next era of sport. We help sports organisations, technology companies and investors grow their business in sport through strategy, digital transformation and ecosystem partnerships. By combining strategic foresight with hands-on execution, we turn long-term ambition into initiatives that can actually be deployed and scaled.