We can always say that in poker, the most important thing is not the cards but what we do with them. But we can still add that it is not always very smart to bluff against someone much richer than you. This is what the Professional Football League (LFP) is learning to its cost in the thorny issue of future TV rights for French football for the period 2024-2029.
Now far, very far from its initial ambition, the famous billion euros whose color no one will ever see, in a negotiation where buyers do not rush to the gate, the LFP clings to the hope of seeing beIN Sports win the prize and avoid industrial disaster.
A plan B that is gaining depth
Except that the Qatari group led by Nasser Al-Khelaïfi is still in negotiations with Canal+ to find a distribution agreement for this 100% Ligue 1 channel and that the file is progressing slowly. Unsurprisingly, basically, since Canal+ is determined not to give any gifts to an LFP against which it has been at war for many months.
In short, to speed up these negotiations, Vincent Labrune, the boss of the League, would have tried according to our colleagues to The Team to bluff by leaving out the possibility of seeing TV rights directly managed by the LFP via a 100% L1 channel distributed in a non-exclusive manner.
Lack of luck, it didn’t work and this plan B supposed to put pressure on beIN Sports and Canal+ would be about to gain a little more depth. Thus, as revealed by The Teamthe LFP, meeting in the board of directors on Wednesday, would consider the creation of its own channel and its marketing at a rate of 25 euros per month.
Al-Khelaïfi appears confident
In this business plan, which is optimistic to say the least, the LFP would hope to recover 710 million euros on average per season. Despite everything, this relief plan is not favored by the body, which still hopes that things will get better and that beIN Sports will end up agreeing to play the white riders of French football. It is not for nothing that Nasser Al-Khelaïfi wanted to reassure his audience on Wednesday during a video exchange with members of the League’s board of directors.
The president of PSG and chairman of the board of directors of BeIN Media Group, the privileged interlocutor of the body in the negotiations for TV rights, thus asked all members of the board to be “united and united” their president Vincent Labrune, a condition, according to him, to successfully complete the negotiations.