The sky is darkening over French football. Canal will not make a gift for TV rights: the channel on Tuesday asked for a new call for tenders for all Ligue 1 matches, raising the threat of an even more drastic reduction in club television revenues.
Believing that "Ligue 1 has lost a lot of value" with the Covid-19 crisis and the withdrawal of the major broadcaster Mediapro negotiated in December, the boss of Canal Maxime Saada announced in an interview with Figaro that the encrypted channel intended to return to the Professional Football League (LFP) its share of matches (20% of L1), wishing to see all the matches put back on sale via a new call for tenders.
"We finally came to the conclusion on the Canal side that it was in the interest of all the stakeholders to go through a call for tenders," Maxime Saada told the daily, while according to several sources familiar with the matter, the Ligue favored a reattribution via an over-the-counter agreement between the two parties.
Canal currently broadcasts 20% of Ligue 1 matches, via a sub-license signed with beIN Sports for an annual amount of 330 million euros. The remaining 80% are still broadcast on Téléfoot, the channel of the Sino-Spanish group Mediapro, even if the latter negotiated its withdrawal with the League in December.
Initially, the contract for the broadcast of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 for the 2020-24 cycle had broken records, reaching the annual amount of 1.217 billion euros, of which more than 800 for the Mediapro group alone, newcomer on the French market.
But since September, Mediapro wanted to renegotiate its contract downwards and ended up agreeing to withdraw from the market in return for compensation of 100 million euros, against the promise not to be sued.
Canal has always hammered home, since the 2018 call for tenders, that Ligue 1 had been overvalued by Mediapro. In October, Maxime Saada had already indicated that the channel would refuse to "reinvest at a loss in football". On Tuesday, the manager also insisted to Le Figaro that Canal has "not been treated correctly in recent years" by French football, between the call for tenders and the postponement of matches due to the demonstrations of " yellow vests" for example.
For the chain of the Vivendi group, the call for tenders is a risk: by returning its lots, it exposes itself to leaving empty-handed from the future allocation. But in the opinion of all observers, few other broadcasters (RMC Sport? Amazon? The DAZN platform?) seem able to invest a lot of money in French football.
In addition, Canal has an agreement with its former competitor beIN Sports, and several sources close to the negotiations interviewed in recent days saw them acting in concert on the file.
For the LFP, which did not react in the evening on Tuesday, the call for tenders suggests a drastic reduction in Ligue 1 TV rights, because it brings into play not only all the Mediapro lots (more than 800 million euros), but also that of Canal (330 million euros for two matches per day) which could also be negotiated downwards. Maxime Saada also insisted that the Canal price for this lot had also "artificially soared".
Above all, this situation poses the threat of the "black screen", namely meetings not broadcast. According to the exit agreement negotiated in December between Mediapro and the League, the Téléfoot channel was only supposed to broadcast until January 31 if no new broadcaster is found. Nevertheless, according to several sources familiar with the matter, Téléfoot is ready to play extra time via a new agreement with the League. Currently, the chain also offers daily or weekly offers.
A similar alternative solution is also proposed by Maxime Saada: Canal says it is ready to broadcast the matches in "pay per view", a fee-for-service, pending the resolution of this possible new call for tenders.
