“My watchword will be ‘unity’,” said Vincent Labrune when he was elected president of the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP) – the body that governs France’s top two divisions – in 2020. But with little over a month until the new season, the former Marseille president finds himself in the line of fire, with several clubs in Ligue 1 facing the prospect of financial ruin owing to his failure to find a new bumper TV rights deal.
When Amazon indicated last year that it would not renew the cut-price deal worth only €250m a season it signed in 2021 after the previous rights holder, Mediapro, pulled out of their €800m deal, Labrune made a bold promise. Yet his prediction that broadcast revenues could top €1bn a season in the new four-year cycle has come back to haunt the 53-year-old former communications executive.
