French soccer’s LFP governing body has finally secured a domestic broadcast deal for the upcoming top-flight Ligue 1 season after reaching an agreement with international sports streaming service DAZN and pay-TV giant BeIN Sports.
With around a month to go until the start of the 2024-25 campaign, Ligue 1 presidents voted on Sunday to accept a joint offer from DAZN and BeIN over a launch of a direct-to-consumer Ligue 1 platform.
The deal has also been approved by the LFP board of directors.
As part of the agreement, which will run through the 2028-29 season, DAZN will pay €400 million ($436.4 million) per season for eight out of the nine games in each round (Ligue 1 will go down to 18 teams next season), whilst Qatar-based broadcaster BeIN will show the top fixture each week, or the second biggest game every other round for €100 million per year.
According to L’Equipe, the LFP is also negotiating a potential exit clause after two or three seasons, which BeIN is understood to be open to.
The decision to accept the DAZN and BeIN offers was criticised by Olympique Lyonnais' American owner John Textor who preferred to house games on a dedicated streaming service.
On the eve of Sunday's meeting to decide who would take the broadcasting rights, Textor released a statement calling for the creation of a Ligue 1 channel.
He said: “Signing a long-term deal with traditional broadcasting models is looking towards the past, we should be turning to the future.”
Textor had some stronger words on social media where he commented on the link between BeIN Sports and perennial Ligue 1 winners Paris Saint-Germain, owned by Qatar Sports Investments.
In a now-deleted Instagram post, Textor said: “Congratulations to BeIN Sports! The PSG Network has once again secured the right to run PSG promotions over OL games.”
It has been suggested in some quarters that, under the DAZN deal, the winners of next season’s title would receive less than the €6 million given in the past season to Clermont, who finished bottom, with as many as eight clubs thought to be at serious risk of bankruptcy as a result.
The LFP initially tendered the rights to both Ligue 1 and second-tier Ligue 2 for the next cycle on September 13 after being granted permission by the French government to extend the length of the contracts from four to five years.
However, no offers met the LFP’s asking price of close to €1 billion for five seasons, with the loss of Ligue 1’s biggest star - Kylian Mbappe - to Spanish giants Real Madrid next season a big factor.
The organization 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 on August 18, the league body was under significant pressure to resolve the situation and has now agreed a deal at half the price it was seeking.
The initial Ligue 2 tender was postponed by the LFP last October after its reserve price for that competition was also not met, and was retendered in June.
The reserve prices for the two main Ligue 2 rights packages at that point stood at €26 million and €14 million.
Rights for Ligue 2, both international and domestic, were eventually snapped up in late June by BeIN which will show every match exclusively on its selection of pay-TV sports networks.
For the previous Ligue 1 cycle, global tech and retail giant Amazon paid €250 million per year to show eight matches per week, through its Prime video streaming service, while pay-TV heavyweight Canal Plus paid €332 million annually for two matches.
This was the LFP’s first broadcast rights sales process since agreeing to a commercial partnership with private equity group CVC Capital Partners last year.
In May, the LFP appointed the Infront agency to exclusively manage the international media rights for Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 in several global markets across Europe, Asia, and Oceania.
The body is expecting to receive around €160 million for international rights.
After securing Ligue 1 rights, DAZN now holds domestic media rights to four of Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues as it also shows LaLiga in Spain, Serie A in Italy, and the Bundesliga in Germany.
However, the OTT platform is locked in a legal dispute with German soccer’s DFL body over the tender process for the next broadcast cycle.
DAZN, one of the league’s two domestic rightsholders last season, (alongside Sky Deutschland), has seemingly missed out on the main package of rights to the Bundesliga to Sky but claims the DFL has acted unlawfully in not accepting its bid in the tender.
The DFL was forced to suspend the tender process following the allegation.
DAZN also recently snapped up domestic rights to a major French sporting property, securing a deal with France’s National Basketball League (NBL) organizer and its FFBB governing body.
