Believing that “Ligue 1 has lost a lot of value” with the Covid-19 crisis and the withdrawal of the major broadcaster Mediapro, the chairman of the management board of the Canal + group, Maxime Saada, announced in an interview with Figaro, Tuesday January 12, that the encrypted channel was going to return to the Professional Football League its share of matches and wanted to see all the matches put back on sale via a new call for tenders.
“We finally came to the conclusion on the Canal + side that it was in the interest of all stakeholders to go through a call for tenders”, said Maxime Saada to the daily, while according to several sources familiar with the matter to Agence France-Presse, the League favored a reallocation via a sandstone agreement between the two parties – a modality that Mr. Saada rejects in the day-to-day maintenance, considering it to be contrary to sports law and overstating the value of the prize concerned.
“There is undoubtedly a loss of trust between Canal + and those responsible for French football. We have not been treated properly in recent years ”, he also declares in the same interview.
Withdrawal from the Spanish group
Canal + currently broadcasts 20% of Ligue 1 matches, via a sub-license signed with BeIN Sports for an annual amount of 330 million euros. The remaining 80% are still broadcast on Téléfoot, the channel of the Sino-Spanish group Mediapro, even though the latter negotiated its withdrawal with the League in December.
Initially, the contract for the broadcasting of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 for the period 2020-2024 had broken records, reaching the annual amount of 1.217 billion euros, of which more than 800 for the only group Mediapro, newcomer on the French market. But since September, Mediapro wanted to renegotiate its contract downwards and ended up agreeing to withdraw from the market in return for compensation of 100 million euros.
Canal + has always insisted, since the 2018 call for tenders, that Ligue 1 had been overestimated by Mediapro. In October, Mr. Saada had already indicated that the channel would refuse to “Reinvest at a loss in football”.
