At the time of writing, it is unknown who will broadcast Ligue 1 football for the period 2024-2029. The latest discussions put the Dazn and Amazon platforms in a good position against the beIN Sports channel. Pending the outcome of the negotiations, currently being conducted over-the-counter after the failure in mid-October of the call for tenders from the Professional Football League (LFP), TV rights: football at all costs, a series audio on L’Equipe.fr, the site of the major sports daily, serves as an aperitif.
In five episodes, Sacha Nokovitch, who follows this issue for the newspaper L’Equipe, returns, with the know-how of the Insider Podcast studio, to the significant episodes in the sale of these rights.
Broadcasting rights are fundamental in the financing of football clubs: the negotiation is highly uncertain for their future, already jeopardized by the collapse of MediaPro and the vagaries of the crisis linked to Covid-19 in 2020. What is recalled TV rights: football at all costs is that, in the auction game, the future of televisions can also be compromised: either because they lose them and have to find other products allowing them to acquire and retain subscribers, or because they earn them and the huge amounts burden their budgets.
Conflicts against Canal
It all started in 1984 when Canal broadcast 20 championship matches for a whopping 250,000 francs (38,112 euros) per match, or 760,000 euros per year. The only pay channel in France was then in a monopoly position, until in 1995 the TF1 group wanted a piece of the pie: the first episode of the series was therefore devoted to the conflict against TPS (former TF1 satellite bouquet). , FranceTV, M6, Orange… taken over by Canalsat in 2007).
Orange (episode 2), beIN Sports (episode 3), SFR (episode 4), then MediaPro and now the VOD platforms (episode 5) follow one another, like the seasons of a TV series or the levels of a game video, to try to decapitate the Canal hydra. They mainly do club business. Channels must now pay more than 600 million euros to broadcast the French championship and, for viewers, the subscription bill is steep.
In the series “journalists’ archives are precious”, the interest lies in the sometimes unpublished testimonies, collected over the years, from leading actors, such as Patrick Le Lay, the former boss of TF1 (disappeared in 2020). , Pierre Lescure, ex-CEO of Canal, or Maxime Saada, director of the Canal group and responsible for acquisitions in sports, cinema and series.
Despite the repetitive nature of the action, the production preserves suspense, although by definition stale. One regret, however: that the role and place of the State – the LFP fulfills a public service mission – are barely addressed even though they are essential.