France’s LFP kicks off Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 bidding for next five years

France’s Ligue Professionnel de Football (LFP) has opened bids for rights to the country’s top tier Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 competitions for the 2024-29 period, with LFP chief Vincent Labrune targeting €1 billion from a combination of domestic and international rights.

The extension of contracts being bid for to five years marks a success for the league, which has lobbied hard for this in order to give more visibility to bidding parties.

The lots to be bid for have been drastically simplified, reduced from seven for the last auction to only two. The first Premium package comprises the three best matches from each match-day alongside digital rights, and the second includes six other matches.

The elimination of a separate digital rights package is likely to squeeze out the current rightsholder Free, and may favour historic rightsholder Canal+, which reportedly has placed a high value on these rights.

Another potential bidder, DAZN, recently launched itself in France in partnership with Canal+, offering subscribers access to two Ligue 1 matches per week through Canal+ Ligue 1, adding a new linear channel DAZN 1 to the pay TV operator’s offering, and the DAZN app to the myCanal service.

One possibility is that Canal+ and DAZN could firm up their partnership to jointly bid for one of the two current lots.

Other contenders

Other contenders include existing major rightsholder Amazon Prime Video, BeIN Sports, which holds rights to matches that are currently exclusively distributed by Canal+ under a licensing pact between the pair, and outsider Warner Bros. Discovery.

One player unlikely to be at the table is former rightsholder Spanish production outfit Mediapro, which was forced to hand back expensively acquired rights when the COVID-19 pandemic pulled the rug out from a business case many already considered to be shaky.

The fallout from those events, and the reauction that saw Amazon scoop up the returned rights, soured relations between the league and Canal+, which ultimately found itself saddled with a much larger bill than Amazon for a much smaller numberf of matches.

The LFP has planned to maximise its take from the auction and to give transparency to its member teams by auctioning international rights at the same time and for the same period. Labrune has set a target of multiplying the value of international rights from €80 million a year to around €200 million.