As the LFP feared, Canal+ decided not to participate in the call for tenders for Ligue 1 TV rights.
French football can tremble. According to The Team, for the first time since the broadcast of the French championship on television, Canal+ has in fact decided not to take part in the call for tenders for TV rights to Ligue 1 for the period 2024-2029. A decision that the encrypted channel communicated by mail to the LFP and which raises fears for the worst.
Historic broadcaster of Ligue 1, Canal+ is broadcasting two matches each weekend this season, those on Saturday evening (9 p.m.) and Sunday afternoon (5:05 p.m.). Two matches that the encrypted channel group had bought from beIN Sports for 332 million euros when Mediapro won the rights for the period 2020-2024 at a high price. But a year later, the Spanish group finally gave up and Amazon was able to recover 80% of the rights, including the ten best posters, for 250 million per season.
Considering itself wronged, Canal+ went to war against the LFP and this renunciation and the end point to this conflict. “Despite these difficulties with the LFP, of which I will spare you numerous other illustrations here, we still decided to study the opportunity of participating in the new call for tenders launched on September 12. Unfortunately, the conditions and the total lack of transparency of this have convinced us that the only objective of the LFP was to exclude Canal+ in favor of Amazon, wrote Maxime Saada, chairman of the Canal board of directors, to his employees in an email relayed by RMC Sport. Either within the framework of this call for tenders, or, even more likely, by aiming for failure to authorize the LFP to once again negotiate directly and under perfectly opaque conditions, the allocation of rights. By declaring to the newspaper l’Equipe on June 6 that Canal+ did not wish to participate in the call for tenders, without even having consulted us, by reiterating these remarks during the presentation of the procedure on September 12, and by displaying a surprising serenity concerning the achievement of the billion euros for the rights of Ligue 1 without the participation of Canal+, Vincent Labrune, the President of the LFP, finished convincing us that it was in vain for the group to participate in this call for applications. »
The absence of Canal+ in the call for tenders nonetheless remains a hard blow for French football leaders who may fear that the candidates’ bids will not reach the billion euros openly targeted by Vincent Labrune.
