Faced with a double crisis, health and financial (closed-door matches and withdrawal of the broadcaster Mediapro), French football begins, Tuesday January 12, at 2 p.m., negotiations with the players’ union, the National Union of Professional Footballers ( UNFP), in an attempt to obtain a framework agreement, a mandatory preamble before any possible reduction in wages. Jean-Pierre Caillot, president of the Stade de Reims, will be one of the representatives of the “employers” delegation.
Why do you want to discuss salaries now? Is the situation of the clubs so dramatic? Bankruptcies in French football remain rare …
I wanted this meeting to take place once the contract with Mediapro has been broken. I hoped to have as many elements as possible before. I was also hoping that the League had already found a new broadcaster, but it will be a priori longer than expected. The spectrum of discussions ranges from postponement of remunerations to cuts. This is called social dialogue.
Today, we are faced with the prolongation of the closed session and the failure of our broadcaster. It is opportune to sit down around a table. Our revenues are zero in ticketing and hospitality, there is a shortfall of 600 million euros on television rights and yet our charges are almost identical, since the main charge is the payroll. In Reims, it represents around 60% of the budget, 55% to 65% on average for clubs.
You talk about bankruptcies. The last ones at Le Mans, Sedan or Bastia were linked to poor management. There, I repeat, our stadium revenues are at zero because of the health crisis and only 41% of television rights are secured. Concretely for my club, I budgeted for this position 35.458 million euros and it is only 14.674 million euros that fall. It is not related to mismanagement.
If the pandemic is not the responsibility of French football, the error of choosing Mediapro is indeed …
When I met President Macron last year, he also made this remark to me: basically ‘you believed in Santa Claus’. I would remind you that the 2016-2020 TV rights contract was 816 million euros and that even without Mediapro, we would have flirted with the billion. And then, when we chose them, Mediapro was not an empty shell. Lawyers and counsel accompanying the League all considered the case safe. It’s easy to be a lesson-giver afterwards.
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