Title: LaLiga costs me four euros a month and I can't even watch the matches

A solo developer in Zaragoza launches his first game on October 1. Since August, his backend has vanished from Spain every time there's football on. He measured it, routed around it through Germany, and is publishing the data.

On Saturday, September 5, at half past four in the afternoon, my game disappeared from Spain. Not for me: I could still see it in the browser from my sofa in Zaragoza. It disappeared for anyone trying to save a score, buy something or check the leaderboard. The app waited twenty seconds and gave up. At 19:26 it came back. In between, Athletic had played Atlético and Rayo had played Racing.

I'm Borja. I make games in the evenings and on October 1 I'm launching my first one: KUIPER, a mobile planet-merging game where gravity works backwards. I built it alone; it ships on the App Store and Google Play. This isn't the story of the game. It's the story of why it stops working when Real Madrid plays.

What's happening

The game's backend, which stores scores and verifies purchases, is a Cloudflare Worker. It lives in an address range, 188.114.96.0/22, shared with thousands of other developers' programs. Since December 2024 a Spanish court order lets LaLiga ask ISPs to cut IP addresses during matches to fight pirate streams. When the address is shared, everything behind it goes down. Mine included.

Don't take my word for it. hayahora.futbol, an independent monitor with probes on residential connections of Spain's five main ISPs, shows that range blocked on all five on twelve different days between August 15 and September 6, always during match hours: every matchday since the season began. On the 5th, on Vodafone, my server's exact address was cut from 16:34 to 19:26.

I measured it from home the same day: DNS resolved fine, other Cloudflare addresses answered in thirty milliseconds, and the game's address never answered. That's not an outage. That's a selective cut.

What I did

A solo developer can't litigate against a football league. Cloudflare and RootedCON are already trying, all the way to the Constitutional Court. What I can do is code. Since August 22 (the night my closed beta launched, which was also a match night and also a block night) the game has a plan B: if Cloudflare doesn't answer within five seconds, it goes through a server I rent in Germany that tunnels to the same Worker. During the cut on the 5th, the tunnel answered in 0.2 seconds. Players notice nothing.

The German server costs four euros a month. That's what LaLiga costs me. And I can't even watch the matches.

What I'm asking for

From LaLiga, nothing: block whatever the judge allows. I'm asking for what half the industry has asked for a year: cut specific addresses, not ranges shared by thousands of bystanders. And if a court authorises switching off parts of the internet at fixed hours, someone should measure the collateral damage. I measured mine: twelve days in three weeks, and I keep measuring every minute, from Zaragoza and from Germany. The data is public.

KUIPER launches October 1 and is on pre-order on the App Store. Try it in your browser at playkuiper.com. It works on match nights too. Thanks to Germany.

Data, measurements and code: playkuiper.com/bloqueos · Independent monitor: hayahora.futbol

Data and measurements: playkuiper.com/bloqueos · Independent monitor: hayahora.futbol · Borja, Angry Dad Games, Zaragoza, September 2026.