Parisian supporters in front of the Final 8 of the Champions League last summer.

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PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

This is an indiscretion that could not play in favor of the LFP and all French football.

In an article published Thursday on its site,

Capital

obtained the records of the French championship TV audiences for the past fifteen years.

And the observation is relentless: Ligue 1 has simply lost half of its viewers.

It is therefore complicated to claim a crazy dough, as the other would say, from broadcasters while the new call for tenders is underway after the defection of Mediapro.

Some figures to realize the scale of the bazaar.

The average audience for Ligue 1 matches broadcast on Canal +, which fell to 851,000 viewers last season, was halved compared to the 2007/2008 season.

Ditto for the cumulative audience of all the matches broadcast on the encrypted channel.

The Sunday evening poster, a sort of unmissable event from 2000-2010 in French homes?

“It only reaches 1.207 million viewers on average during the 2019/20 season, a third less than during the 2007/08 season,” writes Capital.

Finally, and this is perhaps the best barometer to judge the plummet of audiences, the PSG-OM Classic only attracted 1.892 million viewers, when the big match of the time, the Olympico OM-OL raised 2.93 million on May 17, 2009.

Another bad news for the LFP

Several explanations for this: a sharing of the prizes between several channels, forcing consumers to pay different subscriptions to be able to see everything when, at the time, it was enough to have Channel to follow almost all the matches of a season of Ligue 1. In fact, many spectators have turned to streaming.

"A Médiamétrie study for the Alpa thus identifies 626,000 pirate spectators of Ligue 1 on average per day of the championship last year," explains Capital.

Not to mention that part of the youth are gradually turning their backs on football, as revealed by a survey carried out in Italy by the firm Stageup.

According to her, the share of 14-34 year olds who watched Serie A each week has fallen from 44% to 35% since 2001/02.

Fewer viewers and paradoxically an explosion in the price of TV rights, this is the strange situation in which French football is floundering.

“A vicious circle has set in,” sums up the article perfectly;

More and more expensive rights, leading to increasingly high subscription prices, leading to fewer and fewer (legal) viewers.

We wish good luck to the League after that to promote TV rights already seriously damaged by the fiasco Mediapro and its billion whose color we will never see.

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