The option of Amazon was imposed on the leaders of the LFP, to read the explanations of Vincent Labrune this Friday in L'Équipe.
Both to stop the bankruptcy of French clubs in the short term and to offer them longer-term development prospects.
For the next three seasons, until June 2024, the e-commerce giant has recovered the rights abandoned by Mediapro (eight games per day) against 259 million euros per year. With the rights already held by BeIN and sublicensed to Canal + for two matches, to the tune of 332 million euros per season (rights which Canal + has said it no longer wants), the L 1 clubs will therefore share 663 million. euros (by adding various other income, those from Free up to 42 million euros per year in particular) against the 830 million euros promised by Mediapro out of a total for all rights of 1.153 billion euros .
“We go from an actor who was not known for its solvency
(Editor's note: Mediapro)
to the second largest global company which weighs more than 1,600 billion in market capitalization, says Labrune. Amazon aims to become one of the biggest players in the sports rights market over the next twenty years. And it is incidentally a partner that all leagues around the world are tearing up and dreaming of having for the future. You would have to be crazy to refuse Amazon, let this train pass, and risk it not coming back next time. "
In terms of exposure of the L 1, the e-commerce giant also gives full satisfaction to the LFP.
"Amazon is the crossroads of the mode of consumption of the fans, it is a tool which is received by 10 million households in France, the double of the households subscribed to Canal +", underlines Labrune.
The highest bidder option
The latter explains further that the LFP went to the "best bidder", financially: "In the situation where the clubs are, it was difficult to explain that 60 million € guaranteed more per year, it was less good than € 78m hypothetical, as proposed by Canal +. On 600 million euros of rights, it still makes a difference of 10%. (…) We have said it for nine months: we are in a dramatic financial situation. Football today is the steel industry forty years ago. We are bloodless financially, everyone knows that. 60m € difference, or 180m € over three years, for clubs that do not even know how they are going to finish the exercise, it is a lot of money. "
Labrune also defeats the argument of Canal + that the channel ends up paying more for two games - in accordance with the 2018 call for tenders - than Amazon for eight and which has therefore announced that it is giving up its two matches and in Ligue 1: “Justice proved us right. But more metaphorically: if you buy an apartment and two years later the real estate market collapses, you can't tell whoever sold it to you that it was too expensive… You have to be serious . "
Finally, the president of the LFP justifies the transition to 18 clubs, scheduled for 2023-2024. "When people come to tell us: 'The English play at 20 and that does not prevent them from winning", I answer that they have investors who have put in hundreds and hundreds of millions of euros over the past fifteen years. in their clubs. They have three times the rights of others. I love the idea of the European Big Five. But sportingly, we are not there. Our competitors today are not the English, the Italians, the Spaniards and the Germans but rather the Portuguese, the Russians and the Ukrainians. But there is no inevitability and I certainly hope that the field of reforms that we have launched will allow us to regain our place. "