how Mediapro brought French football up to the wall

We are in stoppage time for French football with the crise Mediapro and a whole series of meetings is taking place this Thursday, December 10 at the Professional Football League because the Spanish group that holds the rights to football no longer pay anything.

We are approaching the truce for confectioners but it is the small Ligue 1 clubs that will be brown. The crisis is gaining the soft underbelly of the ranking. During the first payment difficulties, when there was confinement in April and the championship was stopped, the less financial income was mainly the payment of performance bonuses. Basically, it affected the big clubs who continue to have solid shareholders and large financial resources.

Today it’s the cash flow of smaller clubs like Niort, Caen, Angers who ends up dry. We must also recognize that 2020 was an atypical year for the football financing model, but the reality is that in the Mediapro plane crash, we were in the midst of an accident. TV rights, in normal times, are 50 to 60% of a club’s funding. The ticket office is 30%.

Revenues from small clubs in free fall

The more you are a small club and the greater the share of TV rights because you have less merchandising, less capacity to welcome spectators, less income on dream posters.

Obviously, with games behind closed doors, the ticket office fell. And with Mediapro, three quarters of the budget are threatened. Donc on a clubs at risk of going bankrupt. Notably because they live from the Mediapro chimera beyond their means.

The Professional Football League had to take out a bank loan to pay the sums promised to the clubs in October, but it becomes complicated because the bank guarantees fall one after the other for the LFP. It is starting to look like an over-indebted family economy.

But, above all, when we look at the calendar. The transfer window ended on October 5 when we still believed in the billion that Mediapro would pay. On October 6, when the clubs had bought the players, Mediapro made it clear that it would not honor the sums promised.
The clubs are like Perrette and the Pot au lait, they had started living in a castle in Spain. Today, they find themselves with a bloodless economy and their best players who will be able to leave because they will no longer be bound by their contracts if the clubs go bankrupt or do not pay their salaries.

Who to save French football?

The state has already warned, it will not bail out. It is true that it would be a little hard to admit to save clubs with millionaire players by the time of SME are also fighting for their survival.

We understand that we will try to exfiltrate Mediapro and give back the championship to Canal or BeIn. But we will inevitably leave some feathers at the financial level. Today, it is played at the Commercial Court of Nanterre like a construction company. This is not at all suited to the football business model. We cannot stop the activity and cancel the invoices to the suppliers.

The championship continues. Every month is 15% of the annual result which is not financed. It’s urgent. And then, there is perhaps also an urgency to say that 20 clubs is too many and that the championship and the way football is financed must be reformed. This is also used for crises: to clean the Augean stables.

The score: 18/20 encouraging for Europe

It is revealed with the crisis, as often. Summit today in Brussels, and obviously, Poland and Hungary lift their veto and we will have the 750 billion stimulus plan to help countries bounce back from the crisis.

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