Rory O'Callaghan
A legal expert has revealed if football fans could be sent to prison for watching Euro 2024 without a TV licence.
Excitement is continuing to build ahead of the start of the Euros, with hosts Germany taking on Scotland in the opening game of the tournament on Friday night.
The match will be broadcast in the UK by ITV, with the BBC also showing matches throughout the tournament.
In order to watch the match live legally on any channel, pay TV service or streaming service, viewers in the UK must have a valid TV licence.
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The typical cost of the licence is currently £169.50 per year, although some people – including those aged over 75 – are eligible to get it for free.
Despite it being illegal to watch the BBC and ITV live without a licence, some choose to do so in the hope of avoiding being penalised.
But what are the potential punishments if caught?
Legal expert Nasir Hafezi (@tiktokstreetlawyer) explained in a TikTok post last year exactly what could happen and whether you could end up in prison.
Hafezi said not paying your licence fee and watching anything live on any channel or streaming service is a criminal offence.
But to land yourself behind bars, you would need to have a 'refusal to pay the fine' and land yourself in a situation where 'all other enforcement methods have been tried'.
"In short, while you cannot go to prison for simply not paying your TV licence fee, you can go to prison if you deliberately refuse to pay the court fine," the lawyer explained.
Hafezi said that in 2017 there were 137,913 prosecutions over the TV licence fee, and 72 percent of these were for women.
He said the huge disparity between men and women was explained in part by women being more likely to be at home when TV licence enforcement officers visited people's homes.
According to Full Fact, nobody in England and Wales was jailed for not paying their TV licence or dodging the resulting fine in 2020 or 2021, while in 2019 no more than two people were sent to prison.
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