The English Premier League is planning to "clamp down on fans posting unofficial videos of goals online" and is developing technologies and working with Twitter to aid its quest, the BBC reported today.

"You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law," the league's director of communications, Dan Johnson, told the news organization. "It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it. We're developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity... I know it sounds as if we're killjoys, but we have to protect our intellectual property."

Football—also known as "soccer," a word coined by English people to describe their favorite sport—involves the kicking of a ball into a goal, feet-first slides into opponents' legs, and a variety of acrobatic dives. While players other than the goalie are not allowed to use their hands to touch the ball, they may use their heads, and—though generally frowned upon—occasionally attempt to influence the course of play by biting each other.

The Premier League recently lost its most famous biter but will continue to host football games, with a new season beginning this weekend. The league's crackdown on sharing videos follows this summer's World Cup, in which fans around the world used the Twitter-owned Vine and other services to share videos of goals and controversial plays.

"Thousands of goal Vines were posted on social media during the World Cup," the BBC wrote. "With the new football season starting tomorrow the trend was expected to continue. However the Premier League has said that tweeting copyrighted material is illegal and are warning supporters not to do it."

But it's unlikely that the Premier League can completely stop the practice in which fans distribute video taken from TV broadcasts or online streams. "At the end of the day, if I don't do it someone else will," one person who shares goal videos told the BBC. "There's enough out there, if you just search on Twitter, if Gareth Bale scores and you just search within seconds of the goals going in there'll be four, five up... Within another minute they'll be 10 maybe, so if I'm not doing it someone else is."

Fans can watch goals legally by paying £8 a month to subscribe to Sun+, a service from The Sun newspaper, the BBC noted.