Football: Canal recovers Ligue 1 TV rights until the end of the season

The end of a long soap opera.

Football: Canal recovers Ligue 1 TV rights until the end of the season

The end of a long soap opera. Canal and the Professional Football League (LFP) have reached an agreement for the encrypted channel to recover the vacant Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 TV rights until the end of the season, the LFP announced on Thursday, taking action the end of a crisis of several months.

According to several sources with knowledge of the file interviewed by AFP, the Vivendi subsidiary has offered an extension of 35 million euros, in addition to what it must already pay to the League (330 million euros for the season ), to recover all the matches abandoned by Mediapro.

According to these same sources, the LFP thus presented to the board of directors on Thursday a 49% drop in club television revenues for the 2020-2021 season in Ligue 1, a drop of 40% for Ligue 2. This is a huge turnaround for French football, in conflict in recent weeks with its former historic broadcaster who had requested the organization of a global call for tenders including the batch of matches broadcast by Canal.

This agreement will sign Mediapro's departure from the market for good, with the closure of its Téléfoot channel, which is to broadcast until the end of the 24th day on Sunday. The Canal group "will have exclusive audiovisual rights, live and in full each day", specifies the League in its press release.

Since the failure of the Sino-Spanish broadcaster Mediapro this fall, 80% of the TV rights for French football have been vacant. However, this agreement only runs until the end of the season: it will then be necessary to renegotiate the marketing of the rights for the next seasons, with the various interested operators. The initial 2018 tender projected revenues of €1.153 billion per season for Ligue 1.