Ligue 1 (L1) football resumes its “rights”. Saturday August 7, Paris-Saint-Germain start the new season of the French championship as favorites on the lawn of Troyes, while Lille, the outgoing champion, will move the next day to Metz.
This return to the field is still taking place in a very complicated context. After a 2019-2020 season largely truncated by the Covid-19 epidemic and a 2020-2021 financial year marked by the continuation of the health crisis and, above all, the defection of the Ligue 1 broadcaster, Mediapro, football French professional is in critical financial condition.
The boxes of the clubs are dried up. “There were 500 million euros in debt at the end of the 2018-2019 season. We are at over 1 billion today. The clubs are financially drained. (…) The worse is yet to come “, warned, in July, Jean-Marc Mickeler, the president of the national management control department (DNCG), the controlling body of French football, in an interview with The team.
“ It feels like we’re in the movie A never-ending day, regrets Jean-Pierre Caillot, the president of the Stade de Reims, 14e in the L1 standings last season. Every time we solve a problem, there is another one that arises: the health crisis, the Mediapro crisis, the new conflict over television rights … “
Judicial battle
French football continues to pay the price for the storm caused by the defection of Mediapro. The page has still not been completely turned. On June 11, the Professional Football League (LFP) chose Amazon as the new main broadcaster of Ligue 1 to compensate for the defection of the Sino-Spanish group. At the end of a consultation which opposed it to the tandem Canal + -BeIN Sports, the American giant of the online trade got its hands on the diffusion of 80% of the matches for 250 million euros – approximately three times less than the amount initially signed by Mediapro.
We had to wait until the last minute to find out on which channel to watch the two main posters of the first day
But this choice of the LFP pushed Canal +, which until then broadcast two of the ten matches per day of the championship – after a sub-license agreement concluded with BeIN Sports -, to announce its intention to ” not [diffuser] “ these meetings this season. “ Canal + will not pay 332 million euros for 20% of the matches, when Amazon broadcasts 80% for 250 million euross “, launched Maxime Saada, chairman of the group’s management board, in an internal e-mail unveiled by The team.
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