As European soccer’s top leagues begin another season, the world’s biggest pirate television network is back on the airwaves too.

All 10 games played on the opening weekend of the Premier League last weekend were broadcast on beoutQ, a sophisticated Arab-language channel whose brazen theft of sports broadcasts has emerged as a high-profile battleground in the bitter and protracted dispute between Qatar and a group of its neighbors led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The rights to show Premier League games — as well as those in the UEFA Champions League and France’s Ligue 1, among others — in the Middle East are owned by the Qatar-based beIN Media Group, which has committed billions of dollars to acquire valuable sports properties for its beIN Sports network. The Premier League rights are the crown jewel of the beIN Sports portfolio; the package is among the most expensive sports properties, worth more than $10 billion to the Premier League in each three-year cycle via payments from broadcasters in dozens of countries.

For about a year, those games and others, including matches in the Champions League and all 64 games of this summer’s World Cup in Russia, have been stolen wholesale and retransmitted by the bootleg beoutQ network. BeIN Media Group said this week that tests carried out by three technology firms had revealed what it called “irrefutable proof” of its long-held position linking the beoutQ signal to the satellite provider Arabsat, a Riyadh-based company in which Saudi Arabia is the largest investor.