That has never happened before! The DFL is temporarily stopping the tender for the Bundesliga TV rights for the period 2025 to 2029.
Trigger: The streaming platform DAZN (currently includes the Friday and Sunday games) sent an incendiary letter to the two DFL managing directors Marc Lenz and Steffen Merkel on Wednesday, in which serious allegations were made. The letter was also sent to all 36 clubs in the two federal leagues and was signed by DAZN CEO Shay Segev.
It’s about the sale of rights package B, which contains the individual games of the first league on Friday evening and Saturday at 3:30 p.m. and is therefore the most attractive and valuable package. It was offered on Monday.
The tender coordinated with the Federal Cartel Office stipulates that a bidder will be awarded the contract immediately if his offer meets the DFL minimum requirement and is at least 20 percent higher than the second best offer.
DAZN feels that it has been treated unfairly in the fight with competitor Sky for this package!
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The four-page letter, which is available to BILD, says: “We would like to express our deep disappointment and greatest dismay that (…) our offer was rejected, even though DAZN made the financially most attractive and convincing offer for rights package B. We were led to believe that our financial offer was significantly higher than any other offer. We have no other explanation for this uneconomic behavior than that the DFL management had already anticipated the result in order to illegally award rights package B to its preferred bidder and deprive the member clubs of their share of the additional income from DAZN -to make an offer without conducting another round of bidding.”
The dispute is triggered by a lack of a bank guarantee, which the DFL can demand from bidders according to the tender documents and did so with DAZN.
DAZN writes: “In the tender documents we provided on April 11, 2024, we explained that, given the costs, etc., we would not do this in the form of a bank guarantee, but would issue a hard letter of comfort (as we did with the previous one had done the tender). Despite this previously accepted position, on Monday, April 15, 2024, in the middle of the tender process, you demanded a very specific bank guarantee from DAZN within 24 hours – an impossible task.
DAZN then submitted a guarantee from Access Industries in the amount required by the DFL within the 24-hour period to bridge the gap until a bank guarantee was confirmed. Package B has now been awarded to another bidder.
DAZN has called in the cartel office.
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The DFL managing directors Lenz and Merkel reacted to the DAZN letter: “The insinuations and accusations made here are inaccurate, baseless and we reject them very clearly. The letter from DAZN Group Limited also contains a number of incorrect representations and shortenings of facts.
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We will also comment on this to the Federal Cartel Office. DFL GmbH will of course carry out the procedure in a transparent and non-discriminatory manner in accordance with the tender procedures presented to the Federal Cartel Office and the regulations of the tender documents.
In order to protect the legal and procedural security of the procedure, the DFL Presidium and the DFL management have decided to temporarily suspend the procedure in accordance with the applicable procedural rules.”
It is completely unclear how long the interruption will last.
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2024-04-17 19:43:38
#huge #scandal #DAZN #DFL #stops #tender #rights #Sports
