Football TV broadcast: Canal +, the loser who rebels

Audio 02:34

Canal + will not broadcast Ligue 1 next season, to protest against the LFP's decision to withhold Amazon's offer.

© AFP / Martin Bureau

By: Amaury de Rochegonde Follow

6 mins

The Canal + channel announced Friday, June 11 that it was giving up broadcasting Ligue 1 following the choice made by the Professional Football League to retain Amazon for 80% of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 matches.

Publicity

This choice of the board of directors of the Professional Football League is unanimously less a voice, and well it sounded like a declaration of war on Canal +.

Maxime Saada, the boss of Canal +, has long been warning that he could do without matches in Ligue 1, that he had sport with the two most beautiful posters of the Champions League, from this summer, or even Premier League matches, the Top 14, Formula 1 or the motorcycle grand prix.

But it's true that nobody really imagined Canal without Ligue 1. Football is the other pillar of the chain, along with cinema and series. 

Relinquish rights obtained in 2018

So when the League decided to award Amazon 80% of Ligue 1, or 302 games per season and the top ten of the best posters, it was a real break that was consumed. Immediately the Canal + group issued a press release in which it announces that it is withdrawing from Ligue 1 and that it will therefore no longer broadcast the matches on Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening.

In doing so, the group renounces rights obtained in 2018 under license from beIN SPORTS for 332 million euros, rights that it considered much too expensive in relation to the current value of Ligue 1. It suffices, moreover, to give a number.

Amazon will recover for 250 million euros what Mediapro, the Sino-Spanish group, paid 800 million euros

before the failure of its Telefoot channel

.

In total, with mobile rights for video clips of matches, French football clubs will share 663 million euros per year until 2024 against 1.2 billion during Mediapro's time.

For a legal victory?

So the whole question now is whether Canal + is counting on a legal victory when neither the Commercial Court in March nor the Competition Authority on June 11 agreed with it when the group requested that an appeal be made. global offers be relaunched in Ligue 1, including the lot it pays to beIN SPORTS. Canal is no doubt counting for this on an appeal. In the meantime, even if the Canal + channel no longer broadcasts Ligue 1, that does not mean that the Canal group will not broadcast it.

It is a subtlety, but it is present in the press release, because we know that all the work of Maxime Saada was to make Canal a platform with MyCanal and a content aggregator whether it is from Disney or beIN. SPORTS.

Next to Amazon Prime Video, a platform broadcasting matches exclusively with its delivery service, we could then find a MyCanal platform, distributing beIN for the remaining matches.

But it all depends on what beIN SPORTS is ready to accept.

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