Paris (AFP)

The Mediapro page is turned: justice validated Tuesday the withdrawal of the Sino-Spanish broadcaster, allowing the League (LFP) to recover the TV rights of the French Football Championships with a view to reassigning them to another actor, Canal + being a figure favorite.

The Nanterre Commercial Court approved a memorandum of understanding negotiated between the Professional Football League and the Catalan group with Chinese capital, ending two months of a resounding conflict and with heavy financial consequences for the clubs, who are now waiting a solvent buyer.

"The LFP is delighted with this first essential step in the treatment of this major file for the future of French professional football", reacted the Professional Football League in a press release.

Mediapro announced "take note" of this decision and confirms in a press release that its Telefoot channel "will continue to broadcast Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 matches and programs, until these rights are reassigned to another broadcaster".

A new period is now opening for the LFP and its president Vincent Labrune: it is about reselling the rights of 80% of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 to other broadcasters, while trying to limit a discount of several hundreds of millions of euros annually which seems inevitable.

Mediapro had in fact purchased these rights in 2018 for more than 800 million euros per year, but has not honored its payments since October, or 325 million EUR of unpaid bills.

Only 64 million have been paid by the Sino-Catalan group in compensation, and 36 others have yet to be paid in the first half of 2021.

Several sources close to the negotiations confirmed that the League, without going through a new call for tenders, could discuss over-the-counter with potential future candidates for the resumption of rights, including Canal +, "historic" partner of French football , which emerges as the big favorite.

- How much will Canal pay?

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The encrypted channel, which already holds two L1 matches per day for 330 million euros per year via an agreement with the specialized channel beIN Sports, has not let anything filter on its intentions.

Asked Tuesday after the validation by the justice of the withdrawal of Mediapro, she had not reacted in the middle of the day.

But since 2018 and the call for tenders for the 2020-2024 cycle, where Canal was the big loser after decades of partnership with French football, the Vivendi group channel has continued to hammer out that Ligue 1 was not worth 1.153 billion euros, the price initially paid.

Thus, it could sign a beautiful revenge two years later by recovering the matches at a discount: for the entire Ligue 1, a potential offer of less than 600 million euros fixed per year, plus a hundred million in share variable, has been mentioned according to several sources.

Its alliance with beIN Sports, the other channel active in the sports TV rights market, can also be an asset in order to divide up the various matches put into play (Sunday evening match, multiplex, Ligue 2, etc.) .

- A betrayal" -

If the League does not succeed in attracting other players (Amazon, the streaming sports platform DAZN ...), the clubs, which are very dependent on TV rights, can therefore expect several hundred million dollars. euros discount.

This risks forcing the most vulnerable among them to cut wages or drastic staff reductions.

"For us, 65% of turnover disappears. It is serious, it is a betrayal", regretted the president of the Olympique de Marseille Jacques-Henri Eyraud on France Bleu Provence on Tuesday, evoking "a disaster".

The risk of a "black screen", on the other hand, seems limited: the League has negotiated with Mediapro so that its Téléfoot channel, created only four months ago, continues to broadcast the matches as long as the terms of the future broadcast are not not known, until January 31, 2021.

For the fifty or so journalists from the Téléfoot editorial staff, and for all the employees of the channel, the future is therefore always more uncertain, even if Mediapro held Tuesday to salute "the extraordinary work carried out by all the employees of the chain ", in a press release.

There remains the question of subscriptions: according to a lawyer from UFC Que Choisir, subscribers will be able to stop paying the monthly payments, in particular by putting an end to banking regulations, as soon as they see the end of the broadcasting of the championship.

Mediapro boss Jaume Roures said in October that Téléfoot had 600,000 subscribers who subscribed to the channel's various offers.

© 2020 AFP