The crisis that shakes and worries French football continues.
While Mediapro, its major broadcaster, has not honored the payment of its deadlines to the League (LFP) and that mediation is still underway to try to find a favorable outcome, the next few days are shaping up to be decisive.
According to our information, the future of Téléfoot, the channel created by Mediapro to broadcast Ligue 1, is indeed hanging by a thread.
And it is Jean-Michel Roussier, deputy consulting director of Téléfoot, who announced it this Tuesday afternoon to the management teams of the chain.
The former president of OM explained that Jaume Roures, the boss of Mediapro, had some time ago proposed to Canal + to take over all broadcasting rights, aware that the channel would not be distributed by CanalSat and therefore that its economic model “would not hold up”.
Canal +, which currently broadcasts the Saturday evening match, refused, preferring to wait for the rest of the operations and, moreover, being especially interested in the broadcast of the Sunday evening poster.
The end of the Sunday night game on Téléfoot?
This refusal embarrasses the League and places it in an impasse.
As a reminder, it ends up with nearly 350 million euros of unpaid bills in two months from its main broadcaster, out of an initial total amount of 1.153 billion euros per year for Ligue 1, including 780 million euros supposed to come from Mediapro.
The League therefore proposed to Jaume Roures a last solution: an annual amount discounted ... without the Sunday match, 9 pm.
The Téléfoot teams were informed on Tuesday that Julien Bergeaud, general manager of the channel, and his teams were working on the development of a project on this hypothesis "with a subscription price which would be less important".
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Jaume Roures will then have to validate or not this last solution.
A refusal would certainly mark the end of Téléfoot and the accentuation of this major crisis for French football, where Canal + and BeIN Sports would find themselves in the position of potential saviors.