Mediapro: has French football been too greedy?

Neymar and Kylian Mbappé (PSG), two of the highest paid players in the world.

David Ramos / Pool via REUTERS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Text by: Farid Achache Follow

6 min

Mediapro, which launched the dedicated Téléfoot channel in France this season, is asking the Professional Football League (LFP) for a delay to settle its deadline of October 6 (172 M EUR) while the fees set for the 2020-2021 season are amount to 780 million euros for Ligue 1 and 34 for Ligue 2. In a rather worrying economic impasse, French football trembles.

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What if French football had eyes bigger than its stomach?

Indeed, deprived of ticketing revenues and weakened by a very calm transfer market, the French clubs are now paying the bill.

What bitterly regret having let yourself be intoxicated by the huge contract signed in 2018 with the audiovisual group Mediapro for more than 800 million euros per season?

Mediapro, holder of most of the TV broadcasting rights for Ligue 1 and Ligue 2, has entered into a standoff with French football authorities by demanding to renegotiate downward its record contract.

The Sino-Spanish group did not honor a deadline estimated at 172 million on October 5, plunging into concern the professional clubs, whose TV rights are the main source of income (36% for the L1 in 2018-19 according to the National Management Control Department [DNCG], financial policeman of French football).

"

The race for increasingly high TV rights has therefore returned like a boomerang in the face of French football.

Between 1998 and 2008, the rights of Ligue 1 quintupled.

Almost a decade later, the LFP pocketed 748.5 million euros per season between 2016 and 2020. A record amount after 607 million over the period 2012-2016 and 663 million in 2008-2012.

Except that during the last negotiations, Canal +, historical broadcaster of the L1 for 34 years, did not intend to spend blindly.

" 

 ", summed up on radio Europe 1 the boss of the channel Maxime Saada, the day after the call of offers lost by its channel (in 2018).

“ 

[...]

.

"

According to the newspaper

, the Sino-Spanish group, whose basic offer amounts to 25 euros per month, would have attracted only 278,000 subscribers after two months of competition.

Just before obtaining the rights to L1, the consortium controlled since 2018 by the Chinese investment fund Orient Hontai Capital, for lack of financial guarantees, was excluded from the race for TV rights in Italy.

For example, BeIn sports, with a subscription of 15 euros per month, was able to glean a little more than three million subscribers in France after seven years.

And still without any profitability.

The sale of rights to foreign televisions still weak

Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Lille are unsurprisingly the clubs most exposed by foreign television, but French football is far from being the most seen in the world.

If Ligue 1 thought it could finally compete with the English, Spanish, German and Italian championships, its notoriety is far from certain.

It was not until the 2019-2020 season to see China and CCTV broadcast two live matches per day on its various sports channels.

While La Liga, Premier League, Bundesliga and Serie A had already been accessible to the Chinese for several years.

In 2015, La Liga had sold its rights for 375 million euros for six seasons while the Premier League had almost doubled the sum with 660 million euros paid out by the CCTV for three seasons.

At the time, the sale of rights to foreign televisions had brought in only around 30 million euros for France, or a third of Neymar's current annual salary at PSG ...

According to the DNCG, which published its report on the accounts of professional clubs last March, the operating loss for the 2018-2019 season reached 835 million euros.

The financial policeman of French football specifies: 10% of these losses would be due to an exploitation of operating expenses.

And 50% of the increase in the overall deficit is caused by an increase in the wage bill.

In the end, thanks to the transfer fees from all the clubs (740 million euros), the balance of all the accounts of L1 and L2 shows a deficit of 160 million.

But every season, you have to sell the best players at a high price.

And the last transfer market has suffered from the economic crisis that has hit the world since the start of the coronavirus crisis.

An additional stone in the shoe of French football.

Overpaid players in France

Would players in France be too paid compared to the attractiveness of the championship?

What some argue.

Pierre Rondeau, sports economist, writes in a column that " 

 ".

According to him, 25% of players in France receive more than 80% of total salaries.

And 40% of footballers live in great precariousness and great uncertainty.

“ 

 ” he writes.

In the top 10 of the most paid players in the world, only two players play in France: the Brazilian Neymar and the French Kilian Mbappé, both at Paris Saint-Germain.

On Wednesday, October 15, the LFP " 

 " Mediapro to settle its television rights deadlines and does not rule out turning to other operators.

The next day, it met to validate a loan aimed at compensating for the amounts that Mediapro refuses to pay to the clubs, of which about a third of the income, on average, depends on these famous TV rights.

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