Finally, the game is only just beginning around the television rights to broadcast Ligue 1 football from 2024 to 2029. The Professional Football League (LFP) organized the auction on Tuesday October 17 in the premises of its law firm Clifford Chance but it was forced to acknowledge the failure of its call for tenders. “None of the five lots have been awarded today,” she said in a short press release published early this afternoon. According to our information, Amazon, the current main broadcaster of Ligue 1 on its Prime Video platform, did not participate in the process organized on Tuesday.
The League hoped to obtain one billion euros per year, including 825 million for France (compared to around 650 today). The LFP had therefore imposed a minimum of 530 million euros for the lot containing the three best matches, 270 million for the six others and 25 million for the magazines. She has not found a buyer at this price, even if she announces “have received several qualitative offers and financial guarantee schemes”. The day before, Monday October 16, interested broadcasters were asked to submit their qualitative offers (editorial coverage, promotion, marketing and fight against piracy).
The absence of auctions this Tuesday reinforces the uncertainty over the names of the future broadcasters of Ligue 1. What will happen now? The LFP will now “continue its process of marketing Ligue 1 rights”, as she announced in her press release. In short, it will negotiate over-the-counter, directly, with potential buyers. Which may also include groups that did not wish to submit a qualitative offer on Monday, such as Amazon or Canal+.
A process contested by Canal+
The LFP has always considered, and even anticipated, the possibility of an over-the-counter process. The failure of the call for tenders it constructed, however, remains a setback. It will certainly be able to allocate the rights to candidates, possibly by redividing the lots to make them more financially accessible. But she risks obtaining a total sum less than her minimum price displayed as a starting position. The mechanism for awarding championship rights through blind auctions with a large number of competitors seems to be broken – it has already failed this year in Italy.
The LFP call for tenders has been disrupted by the protest from Canal+: on September 25, the pay television group threw a chill by announcing that, for the first time since its launch in 1984, it would not participate in the auction for the rights to Ligue 1. In its letter to the LFP – which had leaked to the press, its president Maxime Saada believed that the conditions were not “today not reunited”, particularly due to the “unprecedented choice of a fixed and high price”. The subsidiary of Vincent Bolloré’s group, Vivendi, went so far as to accuse the LFP of aiming to “discard Canal+ and favor Amazon” by aiming for a voluntary failure of the call for tenders, in order to “free from the legal constraint of a call for applications” And “to be able to negotiate once again directly and in perfectly opaque conditions”. The LFP had strongly refuted “assertions or insinuations” contained in the Canal+ letter.
You have 47.87% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.