Paris (AFP)

The only major football championship to have stopped everything in the face of the pandemic, France finds itself faced with a paradox. If its European competitors resume, the financial and sports stall will watch for the L1. But if these foreign championships stop their season, to whom will she sell her talents?

While the German clubs received the government green light on Wednesday to resume competition in May, with the TV rights receipts that go with it, the Professional Football League (LFP) definitively stopped the 2019-2020 financial year last Thursday. And clubs are now thinking of ways to survive four or five months without income.

"The Germans will recover their TV rights, Spain, Italy and the others (too) while we are going to rely on short-time working longer. We are not preparing to be competitive at European level", worried the president of Lyon Jean-Michel Aulas with AFP and the newspaper Le Progrès.

Ligue 1 is already lagging behind its European "top 5" competitors: according to a UEFA report published at the start of the year, French clubs generated 1.7 billion euros in revenue in 2018, or less than Italy (2.3 bn), Spain (3.1 bn), Germany (3.2 bn) and England (5.4 bn).

Is the gap likely to grow?

From the words of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, according to whom "the season will not be able to resume" because of the coronavirus, on April 28, some football players were moved by the repercussions of such a decision.

- "Very serious" -

"I hope that France consulted with its European neighbors before taking this decision, because if it is not the case, it is very serious. It means that it kills its football economy while its competitors continue to be able to access it, "said a club president.

The leaders were then reassured by the Ministry of Sports, the latter claiming to have set up a "cycle of exchanges" with its European counterparts. And the maintenance of aid to the sector (partial activity, loans guaranteed by the State ...) had also brushed aside certain fears.

But since then, some neighboring countries have specified their return to the field.

So much so that even the executive director general of the LFP, Didier Quillot, slipped on BFM TV that "it would certainly be a difficulty for the clubs if France were the only one (among the big championships) to have made this decision" .

One of the main fears of clubs: a fall in the value of footballers on the French market, by far the largest European exporter of players abroad in 2019, according to the Football Observatory of the Center Center International d'Etude du Sport (CIES) of Neuchâtel.

In a study published Wednesday, the KPMG cabinet estimated that the financial value of the membership of Ligue 1 clubs would drop by 27.1% if the season did not start anywhere (KPMG does not consider a scenario where only some championships would stop definitively ).

- "Strong Championships" -

"There could be an increase in economic risk because French players will be less visible compared to players from foreign countries," said AFP Pierre Ferracci, president of Paris FC.

A blow for the "Talent League" and its clubs fond of "player trading" (Lyon, Lille, Monaco)? Not so sure, according to Bernard Caïazzo (Saint-Etienne), president of the union Premier League gathering the majority of the teams of the elite.

"When you are the biggest cement manufacturer in Europe, you cannot hope that your customers abroad are stationary!" metaphorizes the leader. "The real catastrophe would be that the major buying championships do not go to the end. The English market is an extremely strong issue. For our football economy to hold up, it needs strong championships around it. "

"The resumption of other championships can have two contradictory effects: a positive effect because it allows a maintenance of the financial resources of foreign clubs, and a negative effect because it will highlight other players", evaluates Bastien Drut, author of "Mercato : the economics of football in the 21st century ".

"We must not be catastrophic, even if the + small + French clubs rely heavily on transfers to achieve budget balance and will not have their usual window," concludes this football economist.

© 2020 AFP