Paris (AFP)
The Canal + group announced on Wednesday that it had acquired the broadcasting rights in France for the Premier League, the English football championship, for three additional seasons, until the 2024-2025 season.
The amount disbursed by Canal + has not been disclosed.
The group have re-signed for the entirety of the competition, their main football asset, since announcing in June that they would stop broadcasting Ligue 1.
Canal + will also recover, from the start of the school year, the two best posters of the Champions League, until 2024.
The Vivendi subsidiary added, in a press release announcing the agreement, that it had also acquired the rights to broadcast the English championship "from the 2022/2023 season" in two other countries, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, where the operator is number one in the pay television market.
The boss of Canal + Maxime Saada, quoted in the press release, argued that "it is above all a great pleasure for our subscribers who largely approve of this championship".
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With 380 games per season, "they will thus enjoy, until 2025, an exceptional spectacle, with some of the biggest clubs and players on the planet, on all their screens," he added.
For its part, the Premier League said it was delighted to extend its "exceptional partnership" with Canal + and to extend it to two new countries.
This announcement follows a shock decision a few weeks ago by Canal +: the cessation of broadcasting of the French championship, criticizing the Professional Football League (LFP) for having designated the American tech giant Amazon as the new main diffuser of the L1, at the end of a very eventful process.
And this for a price significantly lower than that promised by the Sino-Spanish group Mediapro, before withdrawing.
Canal + had demanded from the LFP that its own batch of matches, which it deemed "overvalued", is also put into play, but the Paris Commercial Court and then the Competition Authority had dismissed its requests.
© 2021 AFP