Tribune. While the football world is holding its breath against Mediapro, which refuses to pay the deadline of 172 million euros provided for in its 3.1 billion euros contract to exploit the rights of Ligue 1 for four years, a cascade of disastrous consequences threatens the football sector: bankruptcies of clubs, temporary stoppage of the championship, non-participation in European cups …
As for broadcasters – television channels, telecoms operators – the sector is preparing to manage the terminations of thousands of subscribers, endangering professional and amateur football, as well as the entire French audiovisual landscape.
Poker shot
On the sidelines of these media victims of the poker stroke played by Mediapro in 2018 on football rights thanks to the supposedly deep “pockets” of its Chinese shareholder – Orient Hontai Capital -, which holds 54% of its capital, it is all there he audiovisual technical industry which is silently witnessing the collapse of its foundations following decisions taken by the former leaders of the Professional Football League (LFP), who have now resigned.
The production chain of the French television image, made up mainly of two companies, AMP Visual TV and Euro Media France (EMF), has acquired in a few decades the most modern equipment in Europe to capture and broadcast in very high definition of the most unifying events on television, whether they are football matches, the Tour de France, rugby, official events – July 14 parade, the rise of the Champs-Elysées of elected presidents -, without count international events such as the Olympic Games, the Vendée Globe, the World Cups …
These great national and international television moments are produced thanks to cutting-edge technologies which require considerable investments and the constitution of highly qualified human resources – seven hundred permanent employees and thousands of intermittents for a million hours per year -, this which places our French image industry at the global forefront of this know-how.
All these investments were made because French companies were able to benefit from visibility into the future of their market, which is very competitive, but structured around recurring “premium” events, the main one being far from the Ligue 1 football championship, and this since the 1980s. Professional football, through the financial volumes it generates, is thus de facto the driving force behind the constitution of the technical and human assets of AMP Visual TV and EMF, which have in fact become the shared technical tools of French television.
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