DAZN and WBD make offers for French football rights

With just weeks to go before the start of the new season, the LFP has finally received two bids for the domestic rights to Ligue 1 football.

First, L’Equipe reported DAZN had entered the auction with a €375 million bod for 8 of the 9 matches available in each matchday.

Separately, RMC revealed Warner Bros Discovery would take all available matches to bolster its Max streaming platform that launched in the French market last month. The WBD proposal would be subject to the number of subcribers, but could bring the Ligue up to €600 million.

The LFP has been working for months on a new broadcaster and now has until August 16 to find a solution. The current deal with Amazon – one mired in controversy – expired at the end of last season.

The League has even considered launching its own channel with all Ligue 1 matches available for a monthly €25 fee.

The clubs are said to prefer the option of a tie-up with WBD, rather than take on the risk of setting up their own broadcast channel, even though the plans are said to be well advanced. WBD would charge €27.99 a month for a package that would also include the rest of the Max catalogue.

Neither Canal plus nor its partner BeIn Sport have so far tabled a bid.

In 2018, LFP sold the rights to the Chinese-backed Mediapro for a record £800 million, freezing out long-standing partner Canal+. But the choice of the unproven company proved to be disastrous when in the pandemic hit season of 2020 Mediapro ceased payments.

LFP then made an agreement with Amazon, further enraging Canal when it emerged the cut price deal with Amazon worked out as being less that the Vivendi unit had paid for the smaller package under license from beIN.

production. As well as the marketing plan. But things have progressed well. The proof, a broadcast test of this 100% L1 channel is even already scheduled for Monday, July 15, a month before the resumption of the championship. In its projections, the body chaired by Vincent Labrune expects 2.7 to 3 million subscribers over the next five years.
A monthly subscription at €27.99
Despite the agreement signed on Thursday between the LFP and Warner Bros Discovery, valid only in case of validation by the Board of Directors of the League, the vagueness surrounding the broadcast of Ligue 1 still exists but a price for the consumer has been recorded: €27.99/month. A subscription that will allow both access to L1 matches and the entire catalog of the Max platform, not only football or sports, but Warner’s entire streaming offer.
The American company asked the LFP for a final response this Friday evening. But according to information from RMC Sport, Jean-Pierre Caillot, president of the L1 college, spoke to say that the deadlines were too short. Most of the presidents will be in Hamburg this Friday evening to attend the Blues match against Portugal in the quarter-finals of Euro 2024. The L1 college will therefore meet on Saturday at 5 p.m. to decide.
The president of the Stade de Reims added, in addressing Vincent Labrune, that this additional period would perhaps allow him a final negotiation with another important player, implied beIN Sports.
Al-Khelaïfi’s discontent
Still according to RMC Sport, after the presentation of this new strategy by the LFP with Warner, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, who was on the phone from London, spoke to show his dissatisfaction with this option.
“I don’t understand how we got to this point with such a presentation,” said the boss of PSG and BeIN Media Group. After attending the LFP board of directors from the English capital, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi will head to Hamburg to attend the quarter-finals of Euro 2024 between France and Portugal. Will the annoyance of Nasser Al-Khelaïfi and beIN Sports turn into an offer? Meetings follow one another from London.
A clearer decision this Saturday?
In Germany during the match between the Blues and the Seleçao das Quinas, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi will take the time to greet the different PSG players who play in both selections. In the Hamburg venue, the Qatari leader will probably meet other members of the LFP Board of Directors who came to attend the quarter-finals of France.
On Saturday, however, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi will not physically attend the Ligue 1 college meeting and will participate once again by phone. In addition, at the end of the board of directors, Vincent Labrune wanted to validate the allocation of magazines to TF1 and France TV. To which Jean-Pierre Rivère, visibly surprised by the impasse of the situation, opposed by also asking for more time.
The reaction of the small and medium-sized elite clubs will be highly anticipated on Saturday during the L1 college. Their vision is probably different from the big clubs that would have preferred to sell their rights directly to a broadcaster. The main concern of club presidents with tight budgets remains short-term cash flow. The next payments from TV rights are scheduled for mid-August and mid-October. Even if this issue could not be discussed precisely during Friday’s Board of Directors, it should be discussed at Saturday’s college. The LFP suggests that it will have solutions for the clubs most in difficulty. Among them: Reims, Montpellier or Nantes among others. A targeted case-by-case solution could be proposed to these clubs.

Kylian Mbappe has departed Ligue 1 to join Real Madrid next season. (Franco Arland/Getty Images)

International sports streaming service DAZN has made an offer of €375 million ($406.3 million) on average over five years for a major set of Ligue 1 French domestic soccer rights, according to reports.

The L’Equipe publication reported late last week that DAZN has tabled an offer with French league soccer’s LFP body which amounts to €300 million across 2024-25, with the annual amount then increasing before ending up at €500 million in 2028-29.

DAZN would cover eight of the nine Ligue 1 games per matchday (the competition will be made up of 18 teams from next season) through 2028-29.

The reported offer comes with domestic Ligue 1 rights for the next commercial cycle still unsold – the new campaign starts on August 18, with the LFP now under significant pressure to resolve the situation.

L’Equipe reported that a significant LFP meeting on Friday (July 5) did not lead to a permanent resolution.

See Also:

Initial reports putting DAZN in pole position to secure the main set of domestic Ligue 1 rights emerged in January.

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For the previous Ligue 1 cycle, global tech and retail giant Amazon paid €250 million per year to show eight matches per week, through its Prime video streaming service, while pay-TV heavyweight Canal Plus paid €332 million annually for two matches.

The organization initially tendered the rights to both Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 for the next cycle on September 13 after being granted permission by the French government to extend the length of the contracts from four to five years.

However, no offers that have met the LFP’s requirements have yet been forthcoming, with Ligue 1 losing its biggest star – Kylian Mbappe – to Spanish giants Real Madrid next season.

This marks the LFP’s first broadcast rights sales process since agreeing to a commercial partnership with private equity group CVC Capital Partners last year.

One solution that is still being considered by the LFP is the creation of a new in-house dedicated Ligue 1 channel and DTC service which would carry 100% of domestic games.

Plans for the channel were reportedly put forward in late June, with French media outlets claiming that a proposed €30 per month service would aim to attract as many as two million subscribers and generate over €578 million in its first season, with both subscribers and revenue growth year-on-year targeted.