Lhe French professional football no longer knows which way to turn. While the conciliation with its main broadcaster Mediapro, which has not paid the 334 million euros due by the September and December installments, has been extended by a few days, its situation is critical.
If an agreement with Mediapro is still possible, for a discount, the Professional Football League (LFP) also hopes that Canal + will make an offer – necessarily down, but which would save the furniture. The former “historic broadcaster”, ousted from the 2018 call for tenders, had already recovered from BeIN Sports a set of two matches.
To deal with the most in a hurry, the LFP also turned to the banks, in the hope of a new loan after that of 120 million euros contracted in October but, for lack of guarantees, the objective is compromised. After believing in Mediapro, she could believe in Santa Claus, but it was to the State that she sent her list.
“Essential” to what?
The clubs have already benefited from partial unemployment, loans guaranteed by the State, exemption from employer contributions and soon part of the compensation fund for the loss of ticketing revenue (107 million euros). They want new exemptions, including the return of collective image rights and an expansion of the impatriation system.
The government seems opposed to these opportunistic tax claims, which are much older than the epidemic. He measures the political difficulty: how to justify aid to professional football, the legitimacy of which, from this point of view, is tenuous with regard to amateur football, sport in general and other sectors more spontaneously considered “essential”?
We may trumpet the great popular virtues of pro football, it is first of all its deceptive prosperity that it has put on show. The League is paying precisely for a race for profit that has made it take reckless risks. This does not plead its case with an opinion already acquired that there is too much money in football.
When Jean-Pierre Caillot, president of Stade de Reims, confided to The team feel “That we are not taken seriously” and that football is “Victim of his reputation”, he clearly identifies the problem. He can rightly deplore the condescension of which sport is the object, not evade questions.
Beyond the debate on the legitimacy of this aid, if it is a question of saving a private sector with public funds, the minimum is to conduct a complete audit on this model which has failed, and to define which commitments the clubs should take in consideration. Save French football, but for what project?
Credit at half mast
Because this model is sick. On the economic level, the diagnosis is known: excessive dependence on broadcasting rights and capital gains realized on transfers, insufficient diversification of resources, lack of own funds, income mainly spent on salaries and recruitments, etc.
We are looking in vain for the progress promised by the construction and renovation of the stadiums for Euro 2016 – again with a lot of public money. To which is added a deep sporting crisis. French clubs do not do much, on the field, with the players they train: they sell them younger and younger. They underperform in European Cups.
The championship, unbalanced by the financial omnipotence of PSG, is all the less captivating as very few clubs are betting on an ambitious sporting project likely to ensure at least a spectacle. Product quality has been guilty of neglect, and Ligue 1 is far from the gaming lab it should be. If French football must be saved, it is first of all from itself.
What credit can we give to leaders who have proven to be as incapable of leading their boat as they are of defending their common interests during the crisis? Do they propose to develop a more sustainable model, less obsessed with the quest for “Competitiveness” and a race lost in advance with the four major European championships? Can they precisely define their contribution to society?
However, the reforms promoted by the big clubs are far from the “New Deal” that one could hope for: accentuation of the elitist model with the reduction of the L1 to eighteen clubs, more unequal distribution of resources and, for some, membership. to European closed league projects… This would not be responding to solidarity with solidarity.
