As we prepare for the brand-new European football season following the conclusion of Euro 2024, the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga prepare to take centre stage as the three best league on the continent.
One league though is struggling and that’s France’s Ligue 1, French football has been long mocked by other football fans as the so called “farmers league” basically French football has always had one dominating force in certain eras of the league, right now that’s PSG and that looks unlikely to change given their financial muscle of the Qatar state backing them.
Before PSG it was Olympique Lyonnais (Lyon) who won every Ligue 1 title from 2001-02 all the way to their last title in 2007-08, with Marseille dominating in the late 80s and early 90s, although they were stripped of their 1992-93 title being found guilty of bribery.
The LFP (Ligue de Football Professionnel) which organises the professional league on behalf of the French Football Federation, think of it like the English Football League. The LFP has had some major issues in recent years, with a TV deal with Mediapro a company that proceeded to not be able to pay and had to exit the deal, it offered to pay League 1 clubs €3.25 billion for four seasons.
That on perception bought French football to the table, however the Premier League this is not, French football has PSG and that’s it. (Other than the odd surprise like a Lille or a Montpellier). The deal was signed in 2020 and would become the second biggest TV deal in Europe behind the Premier League. Serie A had rejected an offer from Mediapro calling it at the time “unacceptable”. The LFP had no such problem just looking at the potential gain, however the deal left clubs to foot the bill, also it didn’t help that the global pandemic shut down sport for a time.
LFP went cap in hand back to their former broadcaster Canal+ to try and salvage a sinking ship, they walked away with a fraction of the money Mediapro offered it also included Amazon buying rights but on the cheap for €505 million. The Mediapro deal was worth more than €800 million per season, what the LFP also did was anger their broadcast partner of more than forty years Canal+ who took the LFP to court and failed both times.
Now the LFP were struggling to get a TV deal after failing to attract an offer, notable because this is the first deal without Ligue 1 poster boy Kylian Mbappé having left PSG for Real Madrid. Despite this the LFP targeted a €1 billion valuation which is looking subjectively massively overpriced. With traditional French broadcaster Canal+ still angry at the LFP and basically uninterested in negotiating with the league for the foreseeable future.
The LFP were so desperate for a deal they got that was worse than the one they had with Amazon and Canal+, signing a €400 million a year deal with online broadcaster DAZN which will be topped up by the €100 million paid by BeIN sport who will broadcast one game per week however they will broadcast the biggest match that week, paying more per game for that privilege.
The deal is €5 million short of the emergency deal they signed when Medipro collapsed and down €82 million from the previous deal. French clubs had discussed building their own OTT (over the top) service to deliver Ligue 1 matches to costumers, which isn’t the worst idea in the world. If you charge €9.99 a month (€119,88 per year) and get five million subscribers which you would think you’d get more considering how cheap that is you’d roughly make around €600 million, that’s not including any costs of servers or technical costs.
Now we face another problem with French football, their clubs just don’t make money, PSG made record losses last year of almost a billion euros, Lyon has just completed a refinancing of its debt and now we have one of the most successful clubs in French football effectively going out of business.
Bordeaux was six-time champions of France, now they a third division amateur club having resigned from the LFP into the Championship Nationale from Ligue 2. The club had been a fulltime professional club since 1932 however no more after a deal to buy the club collapsed.
This was club that won their most recent Ligue 1 title in 2009 before the PSG domination started, they had finished mid-table in Ligue 2, now however all their player contracts have been terminated and their training ground closed.
There is also the question of where Bordeaux will play as their stadium has the potential to be a white elephant with no regular tenant. The stadium’s construction was only completed in 2015 in time for Euro 2016 and hols a capacity of 42,115 which is far too big for amateur club.
The good news is that this isn’t the first case of a professional team resigning their professional status, many clubs have done it, one that comes immediately to mind is German club 1860 Munich resigning to Germany’s fifth tier, before gaining promotion to the third division and gaining back their professional status. However, an immediate return to the professional game is highly unlikely.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is the investment of CVC capital partners who have acquired 13% of the future media right of Ligue 1, if this partnership doesn’t work for the LFP and increase the money for tier media right then Bordeaux will be the first of many to fall.
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