🇫🇷 French Football is Broke

Five years ago, French football was in a fantastic place.

• The best players in the world played in the league

• There was a healthy and deep crop of young talent playing in the league

• A French team made it to the Champions League final

There was momentum both off-and-on the pitch and it resulted in a Spanish broadcaster Mediapro offering €1.1bn for the domestic broadcast rights.

This deal, was the beginning of a drastic and steep downfall in French football.

Mediapro couldn’t meet its payments.

What’s crazy is, Mediapro were in talks to be a major broadcaster to Italian football one year prior in 2019. During the negotiations however, the Serie A team felt that they did not get the sufficient guarantees that Mediapro could fulfil their financial obligations…

Fast forward 12 months, Mediapro won the rights to broadcast Ligue 1… and the pandemic hit.

They paid €172 million in August 2020, but by October, they asked to postpone their next payment. By December, they settled for €100 million and walked away.

Sensing an opportunity, Amazon Prime stepped in with a cut-price new deal. They paid just €250 million to takeover from Mediapro. Coupled with Canal+ adding a smaller package and international media rights, the grand total was €680 million. A massive drop from the agreed Mediapro number (€1.1bn).

The impact on clubs was quite severe…

Lille won Ligue 1 in 2021 but sold stars like Mike Maignan (AC Milan) and Boubakary Soumare (Leicester City) to survive.

Bordeaux were relegated, then administratively relegated to the third tier due to mounting debts. They appealed and stayed in Ligue 2.

Saint-Étienne? They were relegated to Ligue 2, forced to sell Wesley Fofana (€35m to Leicester) and Denis Bouanga to LAFC (€5m). They struggled badly.

Angers, Montpellier, Strasbourg—all struggling financially. Fewer funds mean fewer signings, weaker squads, and more talent drained by wealthier leagues.

CVC Capital Partners injected €1.1 billion into Ligue 1 for a 13% revenue share, offering short-term relief. But it wasn’t enough.

The biggest thing they needed was a substantial (and stable) broadcast deal. The LFP wanted €1 billion for a new five-year arrangement…

They got half.

DAZN swooped in and secured the rights for €400million per year, showing 9 of 10 matches each week, while beIN Sports took one match for €100 million. Adding the revenue generated from international rights and the total revenue came to €580m.

It’s a sad state of affairs. And I have three observations as a result:

1. More Pain is Coming

   French clubs are not out of the woods. More clubs will go into administration in the coming years. This situation eerily mirrors the UK’s ITV Digital collapse in 2002, which pushed TWELVE clubs into administration in the early 2000s. I do not think the media landscape will get much better in France in the coming years— as a result, more pain is coming.

2. Streaming Isn’t Always the Answer

   Mediapro needed 3.5 million subscribers at €25/mth to break even. They got 800,000. DAZN is struggling, they needed 1.5 million subscribers and after 2 years, they have 400,000. This is a cautionary tale for the Premier League (or Premier League fans) that the long rumoured "Premflix" is not as easy as it may seem on paper.

3. Impact on Society

   Remember those videos of Kylian Mbappe meeting Macron for a very formal dinner? Keeping stars like him in Ligue 1 was crucial for broadcasting deals and the league’s future. It really wouldn’t surprise me if Macron wanted to use the mans star power to rebuild the future of French football.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be.

French football’s financial saga is far from over. Buckle up, because its going to get bumpy from here.

Fortunately, for those in the UK, you can watch every Ligue 1 game for the rest of the season for just £29.99 😭 See below:

Back next week.