Since the collapse of the Mediappo contract (provided for at € 780 million/year for the period 2020–2024 but never honored beyond a few payments), Ligue 1 remains trapped in a model that is too dependent on television rights. This fiasco, followed by an emergency agreement with Canal+ then a series of unsuccessful tenders, led to a resale of rights well below expectations – around € 624 million/year for 2021–2024, then no more than € 500 M/year for 2024–2029 via a Dazn/BeIN Sports partnership, a decrease of around 20 to 45 % depending on the cycles. Dazn, however committed to pay € 400 million/year, struggles to achieve its objectives (500,000 subscribers instead of 1.5 m), even claims to arbitrate more than € 500 million to the LFP for rupture, highlighting an economic model deemed too fragile. With each new episode, clubs – particularly the most modest – see their budgets amputated, jeopardizing sports, investments and training.
Far from being limited to TV rights, the crisis affects the entire French football ecosystem. Since the audit ordered by the FFF and the Senate mission, criticisms are increasing: financial drifts of often deficit clubs (cumulative losses of more than € 2 billion between 2018 and 2023), unbearable pressure on wages, violence in stadiums, scandals on arbitration, and judicial investigations. The audit report even mentioned the “announced end” of the LFP if it is not reinventing itself, pushing to consider the creation of a chain controlled by the LFP (carried in particular by Mediawan Sports) and new models of redistribution, at the risk of a deep questioning of current structures. In filigree, economic fragility also threatens amateur football – via the decline in “buffet tax” – and women's football, clearly dependent on income generated in high places
Completely above ground statements!
While French football is sinking into an unprecedented financial, institutional and moral crisis, some continue to play illusionists, waving self-congratulating speeches like smoke bombs to hide the current collapse. This Tuesday morning, on France Inter, Pierre-Antoine Capton, boss of Mediawan Sports and new self-proclaimed white knight of Ligue 1, spoke in a mixture of disembodied enthusiasm and above-ground communication: “We are working there. Mediawan Sports is the partner of the Professional Football League. We are at the service of Nicolas de Tavernost and his teams. We are extremely proud and happy to be able to accompany football in this new transition. The Ligue 1 championship has never been so well done. The work of Vincent Labrune paid since we see that PSG still won the Champions League for the first time this year. The championship is fine. There are very large teams. We have a team of professionals at the head today of this channel. At Mediawan Sports, Éric Hannezo, Frédéric de Vincelles and all the teams are fully to do the best possible in terms of narration and innovation». Between managerial storytelling and strategic hallucination, he delivered a parallel vision of French football – where everything is fine, everything is ready, and above all, everything is to be reinvented. Extracts from a stratospheric glide flight. But the summit is reached when Capton, in the apostle of a football-spectacle 2.0, summons Brad Pitt, Netflix and the changing rooms as miracle solutions to the disaffection of fans.
As if the financial chasm of the LFP was going to be filled with a good traveling or a few microphones in the showers. We thought we had seen everything, but here is that the staging replaces management, and that the camera becomes the last saving of a sport that dies slowly for lack of governance: “I saw through the film of Formula 1 that when we managed to be able to penetrate the behind the scenes of these sports, Formula 1, for example, we hear all the discussions between an engineer and a pilot broadcast live. Football, we still have to revolutionize all of this. A film on football, could Brad Pitt have made a live World Cup match, as it was on a Formula 1 circuit? I am not completely sure. We must revolutionize and allow cameras to enter the locker room, humanize all that. Yes, we have to change, try to innovate. And so today is the beginning. There is a chain that must start for August 14». French football does not need a documentary. He needs a survival plan. While the clubs sell their best players to mop up the debts, while the league is struggling to sell its rights and supporters desert stadiums or light smoke bombs in despair, the football elites prefer to dream of on -board cameras and calibrated storytelling. By confusing sport and entertainment, governance and narration, we risk finishing with a beautiful Netflix series … on the fall of French football.
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