While French football pins its hopes on a risky direct-to-consumer play, the economics – despite some healthy early subscriber numbers – don’t look great. In his second article for SVG Europe, editor-at-large Callum McCarthy looks at why for the Premier League and others, pay-television remains the safest bet – at least for now.
If you’ve attended a sports industry conference or spent too much time on LinkedIn over the past 15 years, you’ll have heard the preachers.
They say things like “old media isn’t just dying, it’s dead”, and “direct-to-consumer isn’t the future, it’s now”. One must accept the dogma of wholly-owned platforms today, or suffer the consequences tomorrow.
No one would argue that Ligue 1 hasn’t suffered enough already. It was only seven years ago that the league turned away from its long-time domestic broadcaster Canal Plus in favour of an astronomically large deal with Mediapro – a deal that evaporated on contact with the pandemic and set French football’s decline in motion.
Since then, Ligue 1 has hit every branch on the tree: spurned and scorned by Canal Plus; let down gently by Amazon; dragged through the courts by beIN and DAZN; rights fees tumbling with every new tender.
It’s for these reasons that French football finds itself at the altar of D2C, hoping for salvation.
This season, Ligue 1 is using its own direct-to-consumer platform, Ligue 1+, to show matches in its domestic market – a move unheard of for a league of that size.
Other leagues have flirted with the idea.
“If Ligue 1+ can succeed in its mission to rebuild French football, it will bring hope to a sports industry terrified of a future without pay-television”
Israel’s Professional Football League flirted with the idea in 2021 before backing down and signing a rights deal with Charlton. Chile’s Canal del Futbol channel was sold to Turner (now Warner Brothers Discovery) for guaranteed rights fees over the long term. The Eredivisie’s 51-per-cent-owned league channel has been underwritten by 49-per-cent partner ESPN (née Fox) since 2012.
None of these leagues came close to the level of risk Ligue 1 took on this season and after a quick look under the bonnet, it’s easy to see why.
The math doesn’t math
This season, eight of Ligue 1’s nine matches per week are being shown in France via Ligue 1+, a wholly-owned subscription platform available directly or via third-party platforms like Amazon and DAZN. There are no financial guarantees underpinning the league’s platform. Ligue 1’s only guaranteed media rights income is for its first-pick match, sold to beIN Sport for just under €80m per season.
For a nascent digital platform, Ligue 1+ has started strongly. It passed the one million subscriber mark in France two weekends ago, meeting the league’s stated end-of-season subscriber goal after just one month.
Should the platform continue to grow as it has, it’s not unrealistic to think that Ligue 1+ could end the season with close to two million subscribers – a prospect made more realistic by its attractive €14.99 price point for annual subscribers.
In the worst-case scenario – one million Ligue 1+ subscribers throughout 2025-26 at €14.99 per month – Ligue 1 would earn about €260m per season including its deal with beIN. In the absolute best-case scenario of two million steady subscribers, the league would earn €440m per season.
That best-case scenario still falls over €250m short of the amount Ligue 1 earned from regular rights deals with Canal Plus and beIN. And unlike a decade ago, Ligue 1 won’t get to keep all of that money.
The league owes at least 13 percent of its commercial rights revenue to CVC Capital Partners, the private equity group that holds a minority stake in the league’s commercial rights. After CVC has been paid out, the league will then have to cover its technical, production and marketing costs for the Ligue 1+ platform, which will be considerable in year one of the project.
All of this uncertainty is having a destabilising impact on French football clubs. The guaranteed revenues of Champions League football have become essential for bigger clubs like Lyon and Marseille to survive, forcing them to gamble their futures on the transfer market. Smaller clubs are hurting, too, forced to borrow money at ever-increasing rates just to make it through the season.
Sole trading
These terrifying economics are why European football leagues won’t be following Ligue 1’s lead in a hurry.
Suggestions that the Premier League could leave Sky and roll out its own ‘Premflix’ service in the UK are often rooted in the idea of pay-television’s imminent collapse. But seeing the chaos in France, is there any reason why the Premier League would accelerate the death of its most lucrative, secure line of revenue?
‘Premflix’ would need at least 5.5 million subscribers at £25 a month, with zero churn over 12 months, to earn the Premier League more than the £1.67bn per season it currently receives for its domestic rights. If that sounds realistic to you, it doesn’t to the Premier League.
The relationship between pay-television and football is symbiotic, and arguably more valuable than ever. Football is the last remaining thread that attaches millions of consumers to a telco bundle that built modern club football revenues as we know them. That bundle remains football’s best bet for at least a decade more, even if rights fees tail off throughout that time.
Should the Premier League ever decide to dip a toe in the water, there are rights-holders outside football showing how D2C is done from a position of strength.
WWE was the first big mover in the D2C space back in 2014, using its WWE Network to sever ties with US pay-per-view providers and keep 100 percent of the revenue from ‘premium live events’. The promotion’s move into OTT was deemed radical at the time, but the Network never threatened to replace the cable TV partners that paid WWE’s bills.
Formula 1 moved into the direct-to-consumer space with F1TV in 2018 and has since used the platform as a way of satisfying hardcore fans and keeping broadcasters honest. F1’s pay-television partners can pay to keep the platform out of their market, adopt F1TV as a bundled add-on, or accept that their F1 coverage is non-exclusive.
Both the WWE Network and F1TV were designed as a complement to strong television deals, rather than as a replacement. If ‘Premflix’ ever becomes a reality, it will resemble these examples far more than it will Ligue 1+ – a rights-holder’s last-ditch bid to regain some semblance of the strength it once enjoyed.
If Ligue 1+ can succeed in its mission to rebuild French football, it will bring hope to a sports industry terrified of a future without pay-television.
For now, heed the old warning at the beginning of WWE events.
Don’t try this at home.
