A billion euros shortfall. This is today the economic hypothesis - in the most pessimistic scenario - used by French football players to quantify the amount of losses caused by the Covid-19 health crisis.
The recipes fall one after the other. Like the ticket office while the L1 and L2 have been suspended since March 13; TV rights with Canal + and BeIN Sports which stop their payments including the next one, scheduled for April 5 (152 million euros blocked), sponsorship and merchandising are also falling. They finally anticipate a dull or worse transfer window with a Europe curled up on itself, each club trying to replenish a war chest before thinking of spending.
French football - apart from PSG - lives on a single model: count on TV rights and balance its accounts with player sales (trading). Enclosed in this scheme from which it cannot escape and having failed to think of an alternative solution, French football is today trapped. It has not been able to reinvent itself. Replaying at any cost, even behind closed doors, becomes for him an emergency but above all a necessity.
"We must do everything for the championship to resume"
On Wednesday, during a round table organized by Be sport and Oblia, Frédéric Longuepée, the CEO of Girondins de Bordeaux, was extremely clear: "It is essential, and that is why we are struggling, that the championship resumes, even if we have no visibility. The resumption of the championship, even behind closed doors, is synonymous with television rights and can guarantee the survival of clubs. Everything must be done for the championship to resume, says Longuepée. In Spain they are starting to talk about it: regrouping the players and the teams, confining them so that they cannot be exposed to their immediate environment, tested every morning. The player with symptoms would be sidelined, etc. "
Behind the scenes, some leaders are working to bring the players back to the training centers. And would like derogations from the confinement generalized to all France. Waldemar Kita also made it clear to News Tank this Thursday: "I suggest that the players be locked up on campus as if for pre-season preparation, with prior medical check-ups. He imagines a month's imprisonment from April 15 to May 15, 2020.
An estimated re-athletic time of three weeks
Neither the State nor the Federation nor the League are at the helm. These are initiatives of a few clubs, in full panic at the dizzying losses. The process has no chance of succeeding. The conditions for deconfinement are not yet fully in place and there is to date no desire to make an exception for footballers. How can we imagine that public opinion would admit screenings for Neymar and Co when there are not enough for hospital staff and in nursing homes for example?
Football wants to put players back to work but does it in reverse. The Federation's medical commission estimates that re-athletics will take three weeks. It is therefore when we know when France can replay football that these 21 days will have to be cut off to send the professional workforce to work.
Football is an activity whose charges are fixed but whose revenues depend on the competition. Player salaries make up the bulk of the expenses. Partial unemployment, a device set up by the State with a salary maintained at 84% of its net total, will not upset the decor of Ligue 1. Xavier Thuilot, the general manager of AS Saint-Etienne, l detailed this Thursday in an interview at La Tribune-Le Progrès .
Nantes, Saint-Etienne and Lille, the most threatened clubs
“We are in a particular economy. For a normal enterprise, the State system would cover 80 to 90% of personnel costs. But with an aid ceiling equivalent to 4.5 times the minimum wage, nobody will discover that the players' salaries are far beyond this ceiling and that the remaining part is therefore our responsibility, "he explains. .
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If a drop in wages is in tune with the times - the players' union is currently studying with the social partners of football the possibility of a collective decrease - it will only be temporary, in order to allow the residents of the Championships to France to breathe in April and May, two months during which football will surely not have resumed. Nantes, Saint-Etienne, Lille are today the most threatened even if we refuse to pronounce the words "bankruptcy". But he is watching.
This Thursday, the Belgian Football League for its part completely ended its competition, by ratifying the classification before its stoppage, on March 7. This is what French football wants to avoid, whatever the cost.
