It’s a file that seems endless. Major Ligue 1 broadcaster Mediapro is suing his showdown with the LFP, but also Canal+ in a three-way ballet about French football television rights. In the latest episode, the Catalan audiovisual group has taken its French competitor to court. How did the broadcast of the French football championship cause such a conflict? Summary in three acts.
- At the start of the season, Mediapro asks to revise its contract downwards
Crossing the milestone of one billion euros annually in TV rights was the avowed objective of the L1 to catch up on its European neighbors. An old chimera suddenly materialized: in May 2018, with a proposal of more than 800 million, the new entrant Mediapro won the main lots of the call for re-attribution of tenders (for 1.2 billion euros collected in total) . And French football opens the champagne … without having really checked the financial guarantees of the Sino-Spanish group.
The horizon has darkened considerably in recent months for the Spanish group with Chinese capital. Mediapro was already suffering from a debt of 727 million euros at the end of 2019, and the financial rating agency Moody’s downgraded the rating of the holding company owner of the group, Joye Media, to B3 against B1 at the end of April. This corresponds to a “high risk” of non-reimbursement or delay in loan repayments.
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Mediapro “has financial problems, that’s for sure. And these are big problems, because the volume (of sports rights) that they have started to manage is enormous”, was alarmed in mid-October Joan Celma, professor of sports business management. “They had their eyes bigger than their stomachs,” he sums up.
Because after having settled its first payment to the League in August, Mediapro refuses to pay the 172 million euros expected in October, demanding to revise the terms of the contract downwards due to the crisis following the Covid-19 pandemic. .
- Conciliation process, while Canal+ places itself
In the short term, Mediapro has placed itself under the protection of the Nanterre commercial court, which allows it to freeze its payments. The League and the broadcaster have been engaged since October 19 in a conciliation process – arbitrated by a judicial representative, Marc Sénéchal – the objective being to reach a solution as quickly as possible, while December 5, the date of the next payment owed by the Catalan company, approach.
And if the outcome of this conciliation remains uncertain, the position of Canal+ is scrutinized from all sides. The historic broadcaster of the French championship is indeed favored by many club leaders. Until now, Mediapro had not succeeded in reaching an agreement with the encrypted channel, the other L1 broadcaster, either for a sub-license of certain matches, or for the distribution of its Téléfoot channel by the platforms. of Canal+.
But at the end of October, Mediapro announced a figure of 600,000 subscribers for its channel, far from the 3.5 million that the group is aiming for in the long term to make its project profitable, which places it all the more against the wall. Jean-Michel Aulas, the president of Olympique Lyonnais, invites us to think about a “simplified” solution and “around the Canal”, while Waldemar Kita (FC Nantes) and Jean-Pierre Caillot (Stade de Reims) say to each other, on RMC, in favor of a return to the forefront of Canal in the event that Mediapro were to “fail” and precipitate the holding of a new call for tenders.
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But the chain of the Vivendi group, already holder of the rights to two matches per day of the championship for 330 million euros per season, will not necessarily need a new call for tenders to stand out. Indeed, it is indeed concerned by the negotiations which are currently taking place within the framework of the conciliation in progress with the commercial court of Nanterre, we learned from a source close to the file.
According to the daily The Team, a potential envelope of 700 million euros per year for all Ligue 1 matches would have been mentioned by the broadcaster, i.e. an additional 370 million euros in addition to what Canal is already paying. But faced with the annual 1.153 billion initially obtained by the League during its call for tenders in 2018, the gap is enough to cringe.
- Canal+ sued
Mediapro decides today to take Canal + to court, accusing it of trying to oust it from the French football TV rights market, we learned Thursday from a source with knowledge of the file. The Sino-Spanish group filed a summons with the Paris Commercial Court last week asking its competitor for damages in the context of the negotiations following the call for tenders for the 2020-2024 period, a- we learned from this same source who requested anonymity.
Mediapro accuses Canal of “abuse of a dominant position” and “abusive and unfair practices”. The French group has not yet wished to comment. At the heart of the conflict, the impossibility according to Mediapro of sealing any distribution agreement with the encrypted channel since the conclusion of the call for tenders. In this case, Canal+ had already taken Mediapro to court in September, accusing the Catalan group with Chinese capital of “unequal treatment” compared to other distributors, in the negotiations for the distribution of Téléfoot.
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It remains to be seen how far Canal+ is prepared to go to recover these TV rights. Maxime Saada, the boss of the historic broadcaster of French football, explained to the echoes on October 30 that “the arrival of Téléfoot practically did not cause us to lose subscribers during this back-to-school period”. large part of the sums initially devoted to the Ligue 1 tender “initially lost, in particular by buying back a batch of matches from beIN Sports.
“The Champions League will return to us next season with, for the first time, the two most beautiful posters of each day. It will complement a rich sports offer (…) This strategy works and there is no question of Plunge Canal+ into the red by reinvesting at a loss in football”, he concluded. Nor, perhaps, in endless legal disputes.