“It’s a national scandal. It’s huge, huge news for the industry. An incoming shipwreck that is just about to hit the rocks and people don’t seem to realise what’s happening.”
The doomsday scenario one senior figure at a leading broadcaster is referring to above is the long-running saga involving Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP) and its failure to sell the domestic broadcast rights to Ligue 1, the top division of French club football — which starts its 2024-25 season in just over a month. They were speaking to The Athletic on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships.
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With no Kylian Mbappe to entice armchair viewers next season following his summer move to Spain’s Real Madrid and concerns over a lack of competitiveness thanks to the dominance of Paris Saint-Germain — they have won 10 of the past 12 Ligue 1 titles — French club football is in crisis mode.
Many clubs there who rely on broadcast revenue to stay afloat are fearing for their futures. Some have struggled to gain access to bank lending because of the situation and transfer-market plans have been put on hold.
Jean-Michel Roussier, president of top-flight Le Havre and former editorial director of the French football television show Telefoot, said: “It is worrying. Like all clubs, we are waiting with a certain impatience to see the amount of TV rights that we can hope for next season.
“We are sure of nothing. We must hope for a miracle.”
The LFP has been trying to sort its new TV deal — for the rights to show Ligue 1 matches from 2024 to 2029 — since October, when an ambitious auction looking to bring in €1billion (£840m; $1.1bn at the current rates) a year was scrapped because there were no takers.
At that time, LFP president Vincent Labrune had hoped to spark a bidding war involving current broadcast partners Amazon Prime and Canal+, as well as Qatar-based beIN Sports, British sports streamer DAZN and potentially U.S. media giant Apple. Yet no offer came and so Labrune was forced to go back to the drawing board.
One media executive told the Financial Times, a British newspaper, that the auction process had been a “s**tshow”.
“LFP has been on this for a year and comes back with literally nothing,” another senior figure at a national broadcaster, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, told The Athletic. “Only six months ago, Labrune promised them Apple and €1billlion a year.”
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The debacle can be traced back even further though, to 2018, when the LFP chose to sell most of its broadcast rights to Mediapro, a Spanish-based company that had just received significant Chinese backing, for a record price of €814million a year for 2020 to 2024, only for the venture to go bust within months of its first season starting.
That move infuriated the league’s long-term broadcast partner Canal+, which was then further antagonised when the LFP struck a cut-price deal with Amazon (€275million a season) because it had paid far more for a smaller package of games (€330m) under a licence with beIN.
The LFP is still paying the price for taking that punt in 2018 and, having burned some bridges, is in an even worse position now than it was then.
With the league in disarray after the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of Mediapro, the LFP took the controversial decision two years ago to sell a 13 per cent stake of its commercial arm to Luxembourg-based investment firm CVC Capital Partners for €1.5billion.
Yet it seems no one is coming to the LFP’s rescue this time.
Maxime Saada, chief executive of Canal+, said last week that it would not table an offer, calling time on a 40-year relationship with the league. He told French newspaper L’Equipe: “We are often accused of being angry, resentful or bitter, I can understand why, but the issue is essentially economic.”
Amazon and beIN have also ruled themselves out.
The situation is a clear and sobering message from the market that Ligue 1 is very much in fifth place when it comes to the big five European domestic leagues.
It is dwarfed by the Premier League — which agreed a £6.7billion domestic TV rights deal with Sky and TNT Sports in December to show matches for the next four seasons, working out at £1.68bn ($2.17bn/€2bn a year) — but is also behind the German Bundesliga’s domestic broadcast income (€1.1bn a year), Spain’s La Liga (€990m a year) and Serie A in Italy (€900m a year). Meanwhile, North America’s MLS has a $2.5bn global media rights deal with Apple over 10 years, which works out at an average of $250m (€230m/£193m) a season.
“It is a nightmare,” media consultant Paolo Pescatore told The Athletic. “This is clearly not a prized asset and this is happening within weeks of the start of a new season. This is terrible for fans.”
There are currently two options on the table — neither of which appears to hold great appeal among the French clubs.
The first is from DAZN, owned by multi-billionaire Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries, for €2billion over a five-year period but with the annual payments on a rising ladder that depends on DAZN hitting subscription targets. So, for example, it could be in the region of €300m in year one but up to €500m in the fifth one. DAZN already has the rights to Serie A in Italy, in partnership with Sky Italia, but is in a bitter dispute with the Bundesliga about its German domestic deal.
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DAZN’s offer is for it to show eight of the nine matches in 18-team Ligue 1 each week, giving the LFP an extra game from each round to sell to another broadcaster/streamer, with Amazon believed to be interested in that idea.
The other option is for the LFP to launch its own channel, in partnership with Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), which would mean Ligue 1 being folded into the latter’s new ‘Max’ streaming platform, with a monthly subscription fee of €27.99. This launched in France last month, in time for the Paris-hosted Olympic Games starting in a couple of weeks, for which WBD has the primary broadcast rights in Europe.
At a meeting on Saturday, the Ligue 1 clubs did not agree on either option. A decision is now expected today (Friday, July 12).
Jean-Pierre Caillot, president of Stade de Reims and a club representative on the LFP’s board of directors, even raised the possibility of starting the new season without a deal in place.
“If we have to resume the season without a channel, for one or two days, we will accept it,” Caillot said. “People will go to the stadiums to watch the matches. And we will be patient. I think it is a mistake to start something in a hurry.”
Caillot also said he hoped beIN might still come through with an offer, an idea LFP boss Labrune has been clinging onto for months. Two weeks ago, beIN picked up its option on the rights for Ligue 2, the French second division, for €40million a year over the next five seasons.
“Until the end, we can have hope… hope keeps us alive. From what I know, beIN is interested in the product. But until today, this has not translated into a concrete offer. It’s a bit of a war of nerves,” Caillot added.
Pierre Maes, a media rights expert who wrote The Ruin Of French Football, the definitive book on the Mediapro debacle, feels Ligue 1 is facing an unprecedented situation.
“Having no broadcaster one month and one week before the start of the season is an unseen scenario in the big leagues’ TV-rights business,” Maes told The Athletic. “Seeing the league president and some of the clubs’ presidents talking and acting like ‘We’ve got it under control’ is amazing.”
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In Maes’ view, a sale to an established broadcasting partner is still the most likely outcome and he thinks Canal+ could still come in with a late offer despite chief executive Saada’s comments.
With the matter still unresolved, experts said the second available option — LFP starting its own channel — presented more challenges.
Jack Genovese, principal analyst on the sports-rights market at London-based research firm Ampere Analysis, told The Athletic: “Direct-to-consumer (D2C) strategies do not just come with higher costs, they’re also risky. They require perfect execution when it comes to the product design, packaging, distribution, technology and pricing. If even one of these goes wrong, the reputational damage could be lasting and have long-term effects on a league’s ability to convert subscribers to their new service.”
Genovese added how this approach was a big change to football’s financial model, as clubs would have to wait for the subscription income to match the guaranteed, up-front payments they used to get from Amazon, beIN and Canal+, who effectively took on the risk of nobody watching on behalf of the clubs.
Furthermore, the league would have to start worrying about concepts such as churn, which is what happens when customers give up their subscriptions as soon as the show (or in this case, sport) they like most finishes — keeping football fans on board over the summer, or persuading them to come back in the autumn, costs money. Traditional broadcasters or established streaming platforms are able to resist churn by offering fans something else they might like while they wait for the football to resume.
There are some possible benefits to cutting out the middlemen, though.
“A potential upside with a D2C platform is the greater flexibility the rights-holder would have in relation to distribution/packaging games,” explained Genovese. “At the moment, most premium football is behind a paywall in Europe, but a D2C service might give rights-holders opportunities to make some games available for free, boosting exposure and possibly making a greater return on sponsorship and advertising revenues. That might offset the fall in subscription revenues.”
All of this uncertainty has left Ligue 1 clubs in limbo, unable to set budgets and nervous for their futures.
Montpellier president Laurent Nicollin, who directed his anger at Canal+ as one of the reasons for the crisis, said: “As of today, there are zero euros from broadcasting rights. So for the moment, there are no transfers. There’s a €20million shortfall. Normally, I have between €18m and €25m in TV rights, depending on the ranking (Montpellier finished 12th last season). Whereas today, there are no TV rights. So, in the box, I have zero.”
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Franck Kita, chief executive at Nantes, said: “We follow it with impatience and concern. We will continue to be ambitious, but we must respect these new economic constraints and, now that we know that times are going to be difficult, it’s up to us to work differently.”
Another leading figure at a French club who qualified to play in UEFA-level competition in the coming season put it rather simply: “The situation is very bad.”
(Additional contributor: Peter Rutzler)
(Top photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)