The billions of euros brewed by the football planet should not hide a cruel reality: the three -color clubs are structurally in deficit. For the 2024-2025 season, the cumulative deficit of all Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 clubs will be able to reach 1.2 billion euros, according to the latest DNCG estimates, the club’s financial gendarme. A level not very far from the losses recorded at the time of the COVID when the championship had been stopped. In fact, it is the tricolor football model that is in question. Too much dependence on TV rights, transfers of players to fill part of the financial hole.
PSG and the French desert: this is what the photograph of Ligue 1 in tricolor football looks like. In 2023, income from all clubs certainly exceeded 2 billion euros, but the amount remains much lower than the Spanish, Italian, German leagues have garnered. Thus, the income of clubs of the English first League have approached the 7 billion euros.
Do you have to see a suicidal court-earthmade? The presidents of clubs and their successive representatives at the head of the LFP have long believed in the jackpot of TV rights and in the famous billion euros. Like what the German and British leagues have garnered. But the Mediapro scandal in 2021 showed off their hopes. This year, it is the Dazn broadcaster who threatens not to pay the LFP the promised billions. Massive hacking and few subscribers explain Dazn’s setbacks. For clubs that live from the soulful TV rights, the end of the season promises to be difficult. Many of them are looking for new shareholders and a handful are even threatened with bankruptcy.
The Ligue 1 of football has never managed to enter the European TV rights race. For the present season, the sums donated to the clubs are almost four times lower than what the British clubs affect.
By buying PSG, in 2011, the sovereign fund of Qatar was at the forefront of a deep movement. The same year, more discreetly, the Russian businessman Dmitri Rybolovlev pays AS Monaco for a symbolic euro. In 2016, the American Franck McCourt acquired Olympique de Marseille, Chinese James Zhou became the owner of AJ Auxerre. In 2017, Luxembourg Gérard Lopez invests in Lille, and in 2019, the Brittanique Jim Ratcliff, from the Ineos group, bought the OGC Nice.
The year 2020 marks the beginning of another phenomenon: the arrival in French football of investment funds, motivated by logic of profitability in the medium term, around more value-value policies on players’ transfers. Toulouse, Lille (again), Strasbourg and Saint-Etienne are bought by this type of companies. Today, eleven Ligue 1 clubs 1 out of 18 are held by foreign owners.