Does Vincent Labrune dream of being a superhero at night? The president of the Professional Football League (LFP), a candidate for his succession on September 10, boasted to The Team of having fought “powerful enemies” to keep the French football boat afloat during his term. A slightly exaggerated account of his quarrels with the Canal + channel (and its representative, former buddy Maxime Saada), a historic partner of French football now erected as a gravedigger.
For an executioner, the encrypted channel has a good reputation: many leaders are waiting for his return to the negotiating table like providence. A stroke of luck, the opposition candidate Cyril Linette made it a campaign argument, taking care to give a lesson in crisis management in passing. “I think that it was necessary to support the evolution with new channels,” Linette explained to the microphone of After Foot on RMC. “Bring in competitors, operators but always keep at least one foot in Canal+.”
A little subtlety and genius of the LFP, Canal has for its part kept a foot in L1 without having followed up on the call for tenders for TV rights for the period 2024-29, and therefore without paying a penny to the governing body, thanks to its distribution contract with beIN. All this is explained by Pierre Maes, international consultant in sports TV rights and author of The Ruin of French Football :
“Canal is the big winner of this call for tenders. Its ‘sports’ subscribers enjoy a poster per week because they have beIN Sports [qui a hérité du meilleur match ou du choix 2 selon les semaines pour 100 millions d’euros]. I don’t see why Canal, which at most has to pay what beIN pays given that it is an exclusive distribution, would pay 300 or 500 or 600 million euros when for 100 million, they have a very good L1 poster.”
DAZN’s subscription crisis and the threat of a new time bomb
A big poker fan, Vincent Labrune would have benefited from studying chess, although he got off almost unscathed with the very rounded €500 million from DAZN – which came back with a discounted offer after taking a monumental rake – and beIN in a deflationary market. Especially for a product that everyone agrees to describe as outdated, and a championship now orphaned of major stars since the departure of Kylian Mbappé.
“For comparison, Canal+ obtained the exclusive rights to the Champions League for almost 500 million [480]recalls Karl Olive, representative of the FFF within the Board of Directors of the League. The real price of Ligue 1 is much closer to that which was obtained than that which one could have dreamed of a few years ago.
The problem lies in the initial promises. Because Vincent Labrune may well pretend to be a PR stunt in the context of negotiations for TV rights, the annual billion euros was more than a pair of aces: it was part of a very concrete business plan. “The LFP’s business plan was 4.2 billion over four years [avec des droits TV valorisés à hauteur d’1,8 milliard d’euros par an]”There, it will bring in less than two billion. We are in the midst of a major industrial accident,” warns Christophe Bouchet, who failed to obtain the necessary sponsorships to reach the final straight of the elections.
A snub to which must be added the exit door opened to DAZN after two seasons according to the agreement made with the platform. A measure unanimously validated by the board of directors despite the disagreements: the risk of seeing the TV rights put back on the table for an even more paltry sum worries in the corridors of the League.
“The worst thing is that this door was opened on their initiative,” the former mayor of Tours is hallucinating. “That’s where there is a lack of knowledge, intelligence, respect for what professionals know about TV rights.” [notamment du spécialiste de la question à la Ligue Mathieu Ficot, dont le départ soudain pendant les négociations interroge]. But DAZN, obviously they’re going to come out after two years. Because today, they won’t have their million and a half subscribers. [en six mois] “.
Aware of the impasse, while the first rumors circulating evoke the cataclysmic figure of barely 150,000 subscribers, the DAZN group has just lowered its subscription to 20 euros per month, doubtless hoping to echo the fight against piracy, which 65% of people surveyed by Odoxa now consider “legitimate”. Outraged, the CEO of DAZN France and Switzerland Brice Daumin speaks outright of “promotion of piracy in the press” to our colleagues from Parisian in the middle of a moral lesson to the consumer (“piracy is theft”), which was probably unwelcome.
“This is something that needs to be worked on internationally to fight against these platforms, on these Internet access providers that can be found in Brazil, for example, where you only had to go on Twitter to access Lille-PSG,” recalls Karl Olive. “It’s very counterproductive for broadcasters. There is collateral damage for football clubs, since it devalues the market price.”
When Labrune confiscates the negotiations and makes the CA “a recording chamber”
On the other hand, the providential role attributed to Cyril Linette is certainly a bit exaggerated, but the opposition candidate has the advantage of mastering the channel-subscriber relationship and understands that the way out of the impasse lies elsewhere than in the repressive tool. “It’s true that DAZN is off to a very average start from a commercial point of view because it’s not good. We need to find a way to co-construct a commercial policy with them,” advocated the former sports director of the Canal group on RMC. We absolutely need to find a solution so that they quickly have more attractive offers for fans, otherwise it will be difficult. BeIN also needs to sign its contract.”
Here’s something else. Because the club presidents were so happy to ratify the 100 million euro deal with the Qatari channel (in reality 78.5 million + 20 more from a sponsorship agreement with Qatar Tourism), during the CA dated July 31, that they were satisfied with a small bullet-point in the minutes to keep in a corner of their mind the “need to adapt the programming of Ligue 2 to be discussed elsewhere”.
They had barely had time to forget it before the issue was already exploding in their faces with the revolt of supporters unhappy with the return of matches during the week. And today, it is hard to imagine beIN, which has still not paid the first deposit to the clubs, initialing the piece of paper in such a quagmire, especially just before an election on which Nasser Al-Khelaïfi intends to weigh.
An example among others in the kingdom of “we take the money and we’ll see the rest later” which raises the question of the seriousness with which this kind of file is conducted and the respect for institutions. Starting with the board of directors, reduced to the rank of “simple recording chamber” during the negotiations for the TV rights that Vincent Labrune appropriated, according to a French football player contacted by 20 Minutes:
“He told us very clearly that he recognized his wrongs, but that he had been forced to operate like that, with three or four presidents around him (including Nasser Al-Khelaifi and Jean-Pierre Caillot), with whom he had meetings. And all that because it was necessary to preserve the confidentiality of the discussions in order to maintain a certain negotiating power.” In his goodness of heart, the head of the League is said to have promised to change everything if he were re-elected.
Another source is also offended by the ambient dilettantism that does not even spare matters as crucial as the second signing of the deal with CVC, at the end of 2023. “Amateurism is seeing people around the table wondering what this unprepared thing is, complaining about not having been briefed before. We do not receive any documents beforehand and we chat for 1 hour 45 minutes on big vague subjects and then in fact, shit, there are 15 minutes left, we have to vote. So we vote, but without ever explaining what were the elements that required a re-vote [en l’occurrence, la contestation par le président du Havre de la répartition entre les clubs de la manne financière apportée par l’arrivée de CVC au moment de la création de la société commerciale de la LFP]. »
“That so much money is in the hands of officials who do not know or are not interested in these elements, that concerns us. Just like the fact that they blindly trust a few people,” he worried in this regard in the columns of The Team Michel SavinLR senator from Isère and rapporteur of the information mission on investment funds in French football, a few days after having heard, in addition to Vincent Labrune, Waldemar Kita and Laurent Nicollin. The Senate announced on Wednesday the resumption of the work of the mission, the epilogue of which is scheduled for October 4. A hearing of Cyril Linette is notably planned after the LFP elections.
Between CVC and Vincent Labrune, the freezing cold
The senators are not the only ones to demand accountability from the bigwigs of the League. CVC, which Labrune was still congratulating himself, during his hearing, for having brought into the French landscape via the creation of the LFP commercial company, has had little taste for the lone rider of the former OM boss in the TV rights file. The investment fund refers in particular to the right of inspection provided for by the agreement between the two parties. As an immediate consequence, it is whispered that CVC is waiting for Cyril Linette like the messiah. The latter’s entourage is careful not to reveal the secret of his relations with the financiers, at most we know that he has already done business with them when he was CEO of PMU. Linette is committed in any case to cleaning up the relationship between the two camps in the event of an election. No mean feat given where he would be starting from.
“CVC, they are green with rage, insists Christophe Bouchet. Their investment has been swallowed up. Not only are they outside the business plan they had set for themselves, but the sums they put in to make this investment interesting have been squandered. They have not even been invested. The working tool in the stadiums, the audiovisual production, everything that is structural has never taken place. There is a time when CVC will demand accountability and where it risks being a danger for the LFP.” When the time comes, Vincent Labrune will do what he prefers: take out his costume of savior of French football and recite his Homeric battles against big bad guys that he himself created, out of interest or clumsiness. On condition of course that he is re-elected.