From Tyrants to Cowboys, Ligue 1 is now football's running joke - but is it its future?
It's no longer the big five leagues thanks to France's self-destruction - and the rest of football better be watching carefully
“He’s doing a great job for you, Nasser, not for us. Ligue 1 has become the most unequal football league in the world thanks to Labrune and his gang.”
That is Lens president Joseph Oughourlian, leaked during a recent Ligue 1 board meeting assembled to discuss the imminent collapse of the TV deal with DAZN. It was in reference to Vincent Labrune, president of the LFP, who has oversaw potentially the most damaging and irreparable period in French football’s history.
DAZN is currently embroiled in intense negotiations to extricate themselves from a €400m-a-year deal with the LFP, who run French league football. At the time of writing they allegedly want out, now, citing a lack of subscribers and a culture where clubs aren’t collaborating with the broadcaster on promotional material.
Make no mistake, DAZN is one of the least profitable media companies in history, losing over $1Bn three years in a row and were largely propped up by a benevolent benefactor - until Saudi Arabia stepped in to purchase 10% of the business for $1 Bn.
Their scorched-Earth business model of attempting to buy market share no matter the cost is truly an example of sports distribution eating itself. But you can read about DAZN pretty much anywhere else you care to look.
The case here is that Ligue 1 is the manifestation of a broken sports revenue model, one which leans so heavily on broadcast deals that everyone involved wouldn’t get a cheque in the mail without it. It is the beating heart of everything that happens, the transfer fees, the salaries, the stadiums, the staff, the works. Without broadcast revenue, football across the world would have been in multi-billion dollars of debt long ago.
Some might consider that a good thing, but it’s only viable if it happens uniformly, and what French football is about to witness is what happens when it’s just a single entity facing armageddon.
If you want to know how French football finds itself here, I go into much more detail in this newsletter from last summer, in which the full sorry episode is laid out.
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But it’s gotten so much worse since then. From €800m, to €600m, to a company now unwilling to pay €400m, Ligue 1’s broadcast value has plummeted for a number of reasons. But as is the way these days, it’s probably easier to list out exactly why.
Why Ligue 1 is on borrowed time
Lack of appetite: There’s not enough desire among rival bidders to justify the type of annual fees Ligue 1 believes it deserves. The why, is explained below.
Negligible international reach: Ligue 1 just does not have the cache of the Premier League, La Liga or even the Bundesliga. Therefore their overseas revenue is around 3-4% of what the PL can generate - at best.
Incompetent leadership: Last year, LFP officials proudly announced they had set themselves an ambitious €1Bn per season revenue target. It was totally out of sync from where the market saw the league, and didn’t consider the extent to which domestic broadcasters felt shunned by them in the past. It was a total failure.
State ownership: LFP let Qatar in, and now they are here, they won’t let go. The league has been utterly destroyed by PSG and their tennis coach-turned executive, Nasser El Khelaifi, the Elon Musk of French sport in all the very worst ways. The value of a once-competitive league - there were FIVE different winners in FIVE seasons before QSI’s arrival - from a commercial and broadcast standpoint has been utterly decimated by sportswashing, and it’s not coming back.
It’s a Feeder league: Ligue 1 brands itself ‘The League of Talents’ but now it simply has to, to make ends meet. All its member clubs need to sell players in order to break even following the collapse of the TV deal value and, other than the parasitic PSG, the rest are either running at a loss or are being positioned to be feeder clubs for other countries.
A magic broadcast deal isn’t coming back: As former Scottish league exec Roger Mitchell consistently references, this is a broken model and the idea of a unicorn TV deal isn’t returning. If anything, the current deal with DAZN merely delayed the inevitable, and has still proven to be a disaster. We’re entering a new normal, and it won’t bode well for those without a broadcaster propping up their expenditure.
DAZN are suing: DAZN reluctantly made an overdue €35m payment last month to placate the league but the relationship is already at breaking point. They like to blame each other - maybe everyone’s wrong.
The coup de grace comes from the comments from the beginning - a leaked conversation among Ligue 1 owners in which each looked more ridiculous than the last. Not least the ‘tyrant’ Nasser, and the ‘cowboy’, Lyon’s John Textor.
Execs from other leagues may look on with disdain at what is happening in France, but it’s a country with an unshakeable football heritage. And yet it’s taken less than a decade to decimate it, perhaps forever.
Leagues and indeed sport in general better heed the warning, and fast.