French soccer’s Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), the body that governs France’s top two divisions, has secured domestic broadcast deals for the beginning of the 2024-25 Ligue 1 season after reaching an agreement with international sports streaming service DAZN and Qatar-based pay-TV giant BeIN Sports.

Ligue 1 presidents voted in July to accept a joint offer from DAZN and BeIN over a launch of a direct-to-consumer Ligue 1 platform in partnership with rival broadcaster Warner Bros Discovery. The two deals were approved by the LFP board of directors at the start of August.

As part of the five-year agreement, which will run through the 2028-29 season, DAZN will pay €400 million per season for eight out of the nine games in each, whilst BeIN will show the top fixture each week, or the second biggest game every other round for €100 million per year.

Additionally, there are “significant achievable bonuses” inserted into its deal with DAZN including an automatic €50 million payout to the league should the service hit 1.5 million subscribers in the country, alongside “flexible exit clauses” to help ensure the league should it find the deal dissatisfactory in the future.

This reportedly includes a break clause should DAZN fail to amass 1.5 million subscribers. BeIN’s partnership, meanwhile, also comprises a sponsorship component that makes up around €20 million of the €100 million fee.

The LFP initially tendered the rights to Ligue 1 for the next cycle in September 2023 after being granted permission by the French government to extend the length of the contracts from four to five years.

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However, no offers met the LFP’s asking price of close to €1 billion for five seasons. Big factors in the lack of interest were the loss of Ligue 1’s biggest star – Kylian Mbappe – to Spanish giants Real Madrid, the recent departures of Lionel Messi and Neymar, and concerns over the uncompetitive nature of the league with Paris Saint-Germain having won 10 of the past 12 Ligue 1 titles. As a result, the LFP then opted to enter private negotiations with broadcasters.

The reserve prices for the two main packages of live Ligue 1 rights initially stood at €530 million and €270 million per season, respectively. If those prices had been reached, then the main package price would have increased incrementally by €10 million per season, while the second package would have risen by €5 million per season.

With the new season starting in mid-August, the league body was under significant pressure to resolve the situation and has now agreed a deal at half the price it was seeking, and 12.3% lower than the previous Ligue 1 contract.

The fact that the league finds itself in a worse financial position was an own goal, so to speak, that can be pinpointed to 2018 when the LFP awarded the majority of Ligue 1 broadcast rights to Spanish media agency Mediapro for a record price, only for the venture to go bust within months of its first season starting.

Table 1: Ligue 1 domestic live rights cycle and value

In 2018, Mediapro and BeIN Sports acquired the major domestic broadcast rights packages to Ligue 1 from 2020-21 to 2023-24. The result dealt a significant blow to pay-TV operator Canal Plus, infuriating the incumbent Ligue 1 rights-holder and main broadcaster of French soccer for decades.

With Mediapro paying €780 million per year to show eight matches per week, while BeIN Sports paid €320 million annually for two matches per round, the deal fetched a record €1.1 billion per season, a 59% rise on the previous agreements between Canal Plus and BeIN Sports that secured €727 million per season from 2016-17 to 2019-20.

However, the Covid-19 pandemic during 2020, resulted in a significant revenue hit for Mediapro, crippling the agency’s attempt to launch a new pay-TV channel called Telefoot to showcase French soccer, and by October 2020 the company had simply stopped paying the rights fees it owed to the LFP.

The agreement was terminated in December 2020, barely four months into its first season, when the agency failed to meet payment deadlines before agreeing to part with €100 million to exit the contract.

Canal Plus, who prior to the 2020-21 season agreed to broadcast two Ligue 1 live matches per round in a sublicensing deal with BeIN Sports, negotiated an agreement for the rights previously held by Mediapro, securing an additional eight Ligue 1 fixtures per match week.

Including the amount already paid by Mediapro, it meant the LFP received around €620 million for its domestic broadcast rights to the 2020-21 season, which was just over half of the €1.1 billion it was expecting and less than the annual €727 million it received for the 2016 to 2020 cycle.

Before the start of the 2021-22 Ligue 1 season, Amazon shook up the soccer broadcasting landscape in France when it swooped for live rights to 80% of the league’s matches for the three-year cycle to 2023-24.

The deal was reported to be worth €250 million per year, and provided certainty and some compensation for the LFP, after it was forced to terminate the lucrative deal with Mediapro. Nevertheless, the cut-price deal with Amazon, further antagonised Canal Plus who was paying a lot more for just two games sub-licensed from BeIN Sports.

Canal Plus subsequently attempted to terminate the sublicensing deal but failed to do so after BeIN defeated it in court with the LFP intervening on the side of BeIN. Canal Plus then informed the LFP that the company would not seek to obtain the rights to broadcast the league in the 2024-29 cycle.

With Ligue 1 set to kick off on August 18, and reportedly eight clubs on the verge bankruptcy, the approved broadcast deals have avoided a catastrophic financial crisis for the league and provides financial certainty for the upcoming season.

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