Earthquake in sport and broadcasting: the Canal + channel announced Friday, June 11 that it would stop broadcasting the Ligue 1 football next season, to protest against the fact that the Professional Football League (LFP) has retained Amazon’s offer.
“After the failure of the choice of Mediapro in 2018, Canal + regrets the decision of the Professional Football League to retain Amazon’s proposal today to the detriment of that of its historical partners, Canal + and BeIN Sports. Canal + will therefore not broadcast Ligue 1 ”, announced the encrypted television group (subsidiary of Vivendi) in a press release.
A little earlier, the board of directors of the LFP had adopted a new distribution of broadcasting rights, between Amazon, the American distribution giant, and Canal +, which amounted to 663 million euros per year for clubs up to in 2024, had learned The world, confirming information from Agence France-Presse (AFP) and The Team.
According to the distribution adopted Friday by the LFP, Canal + was supposed to pay 332 million euros each season over the remainder of the period 2021-2024, while Amazon paid 250 million euros annually. To this the American group had to add an extension of 9 million euros to broadcast nine Ligue 2 matches (second division of the French championship) with beIN Sports.
The Qatari channel, which was in contention for 80% of Ligue 1 matches and 100% of Ligue 2 matches, for its part, should have been content with two matches per day of L2 (30 million euros), the rest going to Amazon for 9 million euros (plus payment of production costs, estimated at 25 million euros). The operator Free was to keep, him, the batch of extracts in “quasi-direct”, for 42 million euros.
In total, it was expected that professional clubs receive half of what they were supposed to get at the time of the eruption of Mediapro (i.e. 1.2 billion euros), a failed broadcaster whose foray into France had turned to the fiasco.
Amazon, which has entered the sports rights market in recent years thanks to its Prime Video platform (acquiring, for example, certain television rights to football championships in England, Germany and Italy, or those to football matches. tennis at Roland-Garros for the French market) thus made a sensational entry into the landscape of the hexagonal round ball.
The strategy of the online distribution giant is mainly aimed at promoting subscriptions to its Prime platform, a service that brings together music, films, series, documentaries, and which currently costs 49 euros per year or 5.99 euros per month.
The choice of Canal + and Amazon, two partners with very solid financial backs, had to be able to restore a little visibility and stability to the clubs, given the urgency of the situation.
The decision, endorsed Friday afternoon by a vote of the board of directors of the LFP, had been privileged to the detriment of another scenario, which would have seen Canal +, BeIN Sports and Free share the L1 and the L2 for 595 million annual euros, add to that various bonuses. This decision of the LFP follows a resolution taken Friday morning by the Competition Authority, which rejected an appeal by Canal + against the terms of reallocation of rights left vacant by Mediapro, thereby clearing the legal horizon around the folder.