Ligue 1: Amazon buys French football on sale!
Amazon has been trying for several years now to gain a foothold in the sports streaming market. Slowly, but surely, the American company has placed its pawns. Proof of this is with the broadcast of part of the NFL in the USA (American football or ” handegg“), The Wimbledon tournament in the United Kingdom and all Roland-Garros matches on the French Amazon Prime Video platform. This time, the e-commerce giant has taken a symbolic step by becoming the main broadcaster of French football.
Indeed, Amazon just won auction for TV rights to Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 football, on the nose and beard of Canal + and BeIN Sports. ” The board of directors of the LFP (the Professional Football League) almost unanimously attributed the rights to Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 abandoned by Mediapro to Amazon“, Announced the institution in an official press release.
Result, Amazon will stream on Prime Video every weekend 8 of the 10 encounters. The last two meetings had to be available on Canal + since the encrypted channel had won a lot at the time of the 2019 auctions, but she preferred to slam the door and leave the negotiating table following Amazon’s victory.
It must be said that Canal + has it bad since their lot bought in 2019 would cost much less today. They should therefore have paid more than Amazon and only broadcast 20% of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 matches. We could say that we have the bad defeat at Channel+, but we must remember that the privileged partner of French football has not really digested the MediaPro affair.
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[Communiqué]
CANAL + withdraws from Ligue 1
⤵️ pic.twitter.com/Cqeq3b3n0r– CANAL + Group (@canalplusgroupe) June 11, 2021
The LFP does not want to relive the Mediapro fiasco
As a reminder, the Sino-Spanish company Mediapro had won the jackpot by acquiring the TV rights to Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 for the 2020-2024 seasons, for a nice jackpot of 830 million euros per season. In the process, Mediapro launched its pay channel Téléfoot. If all was well in the best of all possible worlds for a while, Mediapro executives quickly realized that their business model was rather wobbly. Blame it on too high an initial investment and a largely insufficient number of subscribers to achieve the sacrosanct profitability.
Result, Mediapro pays the LFP with a first payment… And then declares himself insolvent and unable to pay. The rest you know, the LFP passes for a nozzle and tries somehow to avoid the clubs bankruptcy by putting the rights up for sale.
To keep the rights until 2024, Amazon will have to put on the table 259 million euros per season. A nice sum certainly, which remains however a trifle for a company that has registered 108.5 billion dollars in sales for the first quarter of 2021. If the decision of the LFP to turn to Amazon may seem surprising, it should be remembered that French football is emerging from an unprecedented crisis after the fiasco around the Téléfoot channel of the Mediapro group.
Club presidents blame Canal +
The end of the story comes. The LFP preferred to trust Amazon and its gigantic wallet, rather than choosing its former partners Canal + and BeIN Sports. It’s astonishing because Canal + has always paid for it. But you should also know that the clubs are a little angry with the private channel for having dragged its feet to resume broadcasting last year and for having publicly criticized the quality of Ligue 1 … [Pourtant, un Brest – Strasbourg un dimanche à 14h c’est savoureux, NDLR].
Canal + for its part will broadcast two Champions League posters per day and remains a partner of the Premier League. It’s a bit light for the football channel… On the Amazon side, we are talking about a completely crazy offer at 49 € per year to follow 80% of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2. We are far from the 25 € / month of Sino-Spanish… If this price is confirmed, Amazon may succeed in breaking piracy via IPTV.
