“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.
After months of negotiations during which Canal+ and the Qatar-backed BeIN Sports have turned their backs on French football, there are said to be two offers on the table. The first, from DAZN, is worth almost €400m a season, although Labrune would favour linking up with Warner Bros Discovery’s Max streaming service – a process that could involve Ligue 1 launching an in-house TV channel and that he has estimated would bring up to €600m a season.
Either way, that is a long way short of his predicted figure and way below the deal signed with Mediapro in 2018. Some forecasts suggest that, under the DAZN deal, the winners of next season’s title would receive less than the €6m given in the past season to Clermont, who ended up bottom, with as many as eight clubs thought to be at serious risk of bankruptcy as a result.
“It’s a choice between the plague and cholera,” says the former president of a Ligue 1 club who did not want to be named. “Labrune has always said he would handle the negotiations and that the clubs would be happy with the deal. Unfortunately it’s not the case and he is losing his credibility, even with his close friends at some clubs. What will happen if some lose €25m every year and they are not owned by a billionaire like Nice, Monaco, Saint-Étienne or PSG? Clubs like Montpellier, Nantes, Rennes and Lens will be in big trouble because you can lose €25m for one season but not over four years. If the people have nothing to eat then there will be a revolution.”
Ivan Blum, a former French TV rights executive who works in sponsorship and marketing, says: “It’s far away from what they were expecting and what the president promised to the clubs. The assumptions they have made about potential subscribers are completely ridiculous. The LFP is dreaming about big numbers but the reality is the market is not so big. I think Labrune’s major mistake was to overstate the value of the rights. He thought we could get a deal like they do in Spain, Germany or Italy but we don’t have the same number of subscribers. We don’t have this culture of football on TV.”
Labrune’s public feud with Canal+, which had broadcast Ligue 1 for every season since it was founded in 1984, came under scrutiny in France’s senate this year when he admitted there remained “a feeling of betrayal” about the decision to opt for the Amazon rescue package in 2021. Mediapro’s decision to pull the plug on their contract just five months into the four-year deal that was due to run until 2024 left French clubs on the brink of bankruptcy and led to the creation of LFP Media to handle commercial deals. Controversially, a 13% stake in LFP Media was sold for €1.5bn to the American investors CVC, entitling CVC to an identical share of TV deals. That resolved the clubs’ short-term needs by loaning them an immediate cash injection, including €200m to Paris Saint-Germain, but there are fears that with those loans having to be repaid the new TV rights package will force many to take drastic action.
“The CVC deal was signed on principle that the TV deal would increase [on the value of the Mediapro deal],” says the former president. “But when it’s the opposite [the CVC deal] represents a bad deal because it’s like having a loan at 15% or 18% interest rates for the clubs. They signed this deal because they expected the TV rights to increase by 25% … There is a lot of trouble coming. If I was still involved in French football I would not be sleeping at night.”
Blum says: “For the clubs it’s a catastrophe. There will be two options: either they have a very wealthy owner that will compensate or they will really struggle. But in any case they will still have to sell players and they will have to decrease wages. The biggest earners will have to go.”
The senate is also investigating the creation of LFP Media and the CVC investment, with Labrune expected to be summoned again to explain the situation and the LFP’s spiralling costs, which have risen from €40m to €120m since his election. The LFP did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.
“The amount they are spending is a complete contradiction with the level of the French league,” says the former president. “The reality is that Ligue 1 is now close to the level of Portugal or the Netherlands – it’s very far from the same level of the rest of the big five. This is a really sad story for everyone who loves French football.”
The beleaguered Ligue 2 side Bordeaux confirmed this week that they were in talks over selling a majority stake to Liverpool’s owner, Fenway Sports Group, but there are doubts about whether French football will continue to attract investment from overseas. A spokesperson for Ineos would not comment on reports Sir Jim Ratcliffe has decided to sell his stake in Nice despite being granted dispensation by Uefa for them and Manchester United to play in next season’s Europa League, and the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev announced in January that he was putting his stake in Monaco on the market. But they may struggle to attract new owners in a league that has lost its major star – Kylian Mbappé – to Real Madrid.
“The situation is killing the chance of investors coming to French football,” says the former president. “Why would they come to lose €25m a season because of TV rights? Even if they have a good academy – like Chelsea are trying to do with Strasbourg – they will just go somewhere else.”
