VSt is a stinging defeat turned into a triumph two and a half years later. Big loser of the call for tenders for TV rights to Ligue 1, period 2020-2024, Canal + finds itself in the shoes of the savior – hoped – of French football, in a comfortable position to negotiate with the Professional Football League .
When it appeared that Mediapro would not honor the terms of its contract, an intervention on France 5 by Maxime Saada in May 2018 has resurfaced, whose words have taken on prophetic accents in the meantime. The president of Canal + affirmed in substance that the French championship was not worth 1.153 billion euros per year.
This thesis is somewhat undermined by the fact that, according to The team, without Mediapro, the League would still have obtained… 1.011 billion euros thanks to the offers of Canal +, BeIN Sports and Free for the different lots. But, as we will not rewrite history more than the content of the envelopes, Ligue 1, which had seen itself too beautiful, is preparing to return to the fold by tightening its belt.
Téléfoot, a shortened improvement
Beyond this industrial accident, it is a terrible waste for the staff of Téléfoot and for the experience they had put in place. Because the new channel, watched by so few viewers, had been launched with some ambition, first through the recruitment of its journalists, commentators and consultants.
If some of the latter were running in, the casting had been established for the potential interest of their words rather than for the flashiness of their names, in particular the young pensioners of football Christophe Jallet, Mathieu Bodmer or Benjamin Nivet. The plateaus were uneven at times, but they did not elicit the levels of exasperation found elsewhere.
Even the post-matches – transformed on the other channels into rambling talk shows, devoid of serious expertise and stingy in game footage – avoided endless refereeing controversies to provide game analysis. Tactical questions were even asked of coaches, who answered them. We would have had tears in our eyes.
These audacities would perhaps not have lasted. In 2012, BeIN Sports had raised similar hopes before returning to the ranks by multiplying the programs whose names end with “show” (always a bad sign). Can we expect more quality from Canal +, the channel which set international standards for the production of matches and produces legendary programs?
Unfortunately, the house is no longer that of “Jour de foot” or “L’Équipe du dimanche”, but that of the “Canal Football Club”, a “reference” program that Pierre Ménès has been pulling down since 2009 – which gives an idea of the depths reached. Few more ambitious programs have been fleeting or marginalized. In terms of the organization of meetings, the tendency is more towards one-upmanship than innovation.
Canal +, a cynical savior
As for the “Canal spirit”, it has also surely evaporated in sport as elsewhere. The not very subversive Stéphane Guy was thus laid off after having posted on the air his support for the humorist Sébastien Thoen, dismissed for having ridiculed the program “L’Heure des pros” of the very reactionary Pascal Praud, on the CNews subsidiary …
The management did not appreciate Guy’s joke any more than the petition signed by 148 employees in support of Thoen. Some report “A climate of terror”, in a context weighed down by a voluntary departure plan projecting the elimination of 442 jobs.
Vincent Bolloré’s Canal + can hardly claim the legacy of a channel that we have known more liberal, and which under the aegis of Charles Biétry had revolutionized both the television staging of football and its economic model: it had given competitions a value that it fueled inflation over the following decades.
French football would find in Canal + a “historical broadcaster” who broke with its history, a somewhat cynical savior who torpedoed – with good war – the bet of Mediapro. By allying with BeIN Sports rather than buying part of the rights acquired by the Sino-Spanish group, he waited for the opportunity to acquire them at a discount.
At a time when paid access to football is highly contested and where the national elite must undergo in-depth reform, can we envisage concluding a “quality pact” with Canal +, with reciprocal commitments, to improve the spectacle as much as its value? The moment seems sufficiently indicated to find common ambitions.