Ligue 1 (Soccer)

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares149 Views

    Overshadowed by PSG, Paris FC Tries to Raise Its Game

    by

    PARIS — The contrast could not be more stark.On a frigid Saturday evening earlier this year inside the Stade Charléty, a World War II-era stadium tucked alongside a highway, the stands are barely a quarter full. Only about 3,000 fans have turned up to watch Paris F.C., a crowd so small that when the home team goes to salute its support after its victory, the players need only to go to one corner of the stadium. The other sections are not even open, given the paltry demand for tickets.On Sunday, another Paris team takes the field, and fans around the world tune in to ‌watch. This Paris team, the billion-dollar project you know from the Champions League, the one with all the money, all the glamour and all the stars, has traveled to Marseille for another installment of French soccer’s biggest rivalry. There, it ‌takes another step toward its latest championship behind goals from Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi.‌That yawning gulf between the teams is something that the owners of Paris F.C. are eager to close. They argue that the Paris region, with its population of more than 12 million, deserves an elite league rivalry, the kind that courses through European cities like London and Lisbon, Madrid and Milan.The problem, Paris F.C. is finding, is that even with soccer’s deepest pool of talent on its doorstep and backing from its own Gulf royals, closing the gap in a one-team town is extremely hard.Fans are often sparse at the Stade Charléty. Paris F.C. is confident promotion will change that. Second TeamSitting in a brasserie close to his home in an upscale neighborhood that houses the tomb of Napoleon, Pierre Ferracci, the majority owner of Paris F.C., is ruminating on why Paris — one of the world’s great cities and the producer of more soccer talent than just about any other metropolis in the world — has only one top-division team, Paris St.-Germain.Ferracci, 70, lists a group of European capitals before moving on to other large cities to underline the outlier that is Paris. He eventually lands on London, less than a three-hour train ride away, which currently has so many teams playing in the Premier League that Ferracci gives up on naming them all.He explains away the contrast between France and England (and Germany and Spain and Italy) as a type of French exceptionalism. “It’s cultural,” Ferracci says. “We are less hung up on football than other countries.”He knows that devotion to the sport, at least in Paris, does not run deep. “The supporters here come when there is success, when we climb the rungs of the ladder,” he said. “They stop coming when the team descends.”In the stands at the Charléty, the few supporters seem to confirm that view as they offer different motivations for their presence. Zouber Hadj-Larbi, a self-described P.S.G. fan, said he decided to attend his first Paris F.C. game because it was a much cheaper option than a ticket for the team he actually supports.Pierre Ferracci, the president of Paris F.C., has taken on foreign investors even as he tries to maintain his team’s French roots.“It’s also a lot less spectacular,” he said, laughing as the home team struggled to muster a shot on goal. Others in the crowd are tourists; a few say they are taking in the game only because P.S.G. was on the road.Nearby, Laurent Pinet, part of Paris F.C.’s small cohort of regular fans, commiserated with a friend about the team’s struggles to attract a following. “It’s harder to be a football club in Paris than anywhere else,” he said. “You need immediate results to attract the public.”Ferracci, who has been the majority owner of the club for 13 years, is confident fans will turn out in greater numbers if the team is playing in the top division, drawn by both its success and its name. “The opportunity we have,” he said, “is that we have a good name: Paris F.C.”He admits his club is unlikely to ever be a true rival to P.S.G., and definitely not as long as its neighbor is bankrolled by Qatar. But careful and deliberate plans have been laid to build a team that could finally give Parisians a second top-flight option.That plan is reliant on tapping a resource Paris has in abundance: talented young soccer players.Buying EarlyFerracci’s ideas for reviving Paris F.C. crystallized after a dinner with the famed French manager Arsène Wenger a couple years after he took control of the club in 2008. Wenger used hard data, anecdotes and a list of professional players who had grown up in greater Paris to make his point. Ferracci now often does the same.By his reckoning, 13 percent of all registered soccer players in France are from Paris or its ring of suburbs, and a staggering 50 percent of the professionals making a living in France’s top two divisions grew up in the capital or its shadow. Those players populate not only France’s national team but several others: Morocco. Senegal. Tunisia. Algeria. At last year’s World Cup, for example, Paris F.C. could track seven of its own alumni among the participants.Just being close to the best players, though, is not enough, said Jean Marc Nobilo. A well-traveled coach, Nobilo was hired two years ago to lead Paris F.C.’s youth development section, and he knows that every big team in Europe now shops for players in Paris.Ferocious competition for that talent means Paris F.C. is required to unearth it before it has been spotted by others. Bidding wars are typically won by richer teams, thanks in part to French soccer rules that allow clubs to pay fees — sometimes as much as $100,000 — to the parents of gifted children.Paris F.C. is struggling along in France’s second division again this season. Promotion will have to wait at least another year.For economic reasons alone, Nobilo said, “we must be on the case before the others.”To ensure that Paris F.C. can do that, Ferracci has enlisted star power and Gulf money of his own. The former arrived in the form of a Paris Saint-Germain legend, the retired Brazilian midfielder Raí, who was hired to be a club ambassador and a connection to soccer’s other great talent basin, São Paulo.The much-needed money arrived as an investment from the rulers of Bahrain, the Gulf emirate that three years ago became a minority owner in Paris F.C.Ceding stakes to foreign partners — in addition to the Bahrainis, there are Americans, an Indian group and also Armenian equity owners of Paris F.C. — has been somewhat bittersweet for Ferracci. The cash has helped finance a multimillion-dollar makeover of the club’s training facilities, located on the edge of Paris close to Orly airport, and has helped the club to invest in new talent and the staff to find more of it.But it has also made Paris F.C. yet another club reliant on foreign capital, a trend that Ferracci laments even as he benefits from it. He says his Gulf royals have been far less munificent than the Emirati owners at Manchester City or the Qataris at P.S.G. — Paris F.C.’s annual revenues of 23 million euros ($25.4 million) are roughly half of what Messi is earning to play across town — and Ferracci is fine with that.“What I don’t like are countries like the Emirates and Qatar investing in football because it sets the bar too high,” he said, before launching into an unironic soliloquy about how Gulf-funded clubs have destabilized the soccer industry, forcing rivals to risk financial ruin to try to keep up.Ferracci is determined to maintain control of his team for as long as he can.“Today I still want the majority of the capital to be in local hands, that the majority stays French and national,” he said. “Why? Because if we continue like this, every club in the top two leagues will be in the hands of foreign investors, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.”“The opportunity we have,” Paris F.C.’s president said, “is that we have a good name: Paris F.C.”For the moment, he is focusing on what his investors, and his plan, have allowed him to pursue: a dream of creating the best finishing school in French soccer. New facilities, the chance to play close to home and the ability to offer teenagers an earlier shot at first-team soccer all give Paris F.C. a fighting chance of meeting its aim of filling at least a third of its roster with homegrown talent. Five players in Paris F.C.’s current squad came through its youth ranks. But it needs even more.How it handles those recruits and the others that arrive will determine the success of his project. Paris F.C. is currently bumbling through another year in the middle of the second division standings. That means rubbing shoulders with P.S.G., even as a minor irritant rather than a true rival, will have to wait at least another year.“For now, they are aware of our existence,” said Pinet, one of the team’s regular fans. “We’ll talk about rivalry later.”Tom Nouvian contributed reporting. More

    More stories

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Soccer

      French Soccer Wrestles Surge in Stadium Violence

      by

      The return of supporters to stadiums in France has been accompanied by a series of games postponed or marred by trouble in the stands.Only 3 minutes 54 seconds into the match, Dimitri Payet jogged gingerly toward the corner flag at the Stade Gerland. The game between his team, Marseille, and the host, Lyon, was young and still formless. There had been no goals. There had barely been time for a chance. Everybody, fans and players alike, was still settling in.In the stands above him, Wilfried Serriere, 32, a food delivery driver, looked down and saw a half-liter bottle of water at his feet. It was full. Payet was placing the ball for a corner. His back was turned. In images captured by the stadium’s security cameras and later played in a courtroom, Serriere can be seen picking up the bottle, lowering his hood, and throwing it.A beat later, Payet fell to the grass, clutching his face. The bottle had caught him flush on the cheek.Dimitri Payet has been hit twice this season by objects thrown from the stands.Benoit Tessier/ReutersPayet’s teammates rushed to his aid. Anthony Lopes, Lyon’s goalkeeper, gestured at his own fans, pleading for calm. Later, Serriere told a court that he did “not know what went on in my head: euphoria, I don’t know.” He accepted he had thrown the bottle that struck Payet, but he could not explain why.The rest of France has spent the opening months of the soccer season asking itself the same question. A wave of violence has washed over Ligue 1, the country’s top division, since fans returned to its stadiums in August after a yearlong absence caused by the coronavirus pandemic.Two games, both involving Marseille, have been suspended — and eventually postponed — after Payet was struck by an object thrown from the stands. In Lyon, the players were taken off the field quickly. In the previous incident, at Nice, there was an angry confrontation on the field between Marseille’s players and hundreds of opposition fans. That confrontation also had consequences: A Nice fan was given a 12-month suspended sentence for kicking Payet, and a Marseille coach was barred for the rest of the season for punching a field invader.Those, though, were only the two most high-profile incidents. Fans have invaded the field during games at Lens and Angers. There have been pitched battles between rival groups of ultras before and after games in several cities. Missiles have been thrown at Montpellier and Metz and the Parc des Princes, home of Paris St.-Germain.In all, nine games in Ligue 1 have been afflicted this season by what the newspaper Dauphiné Libéré has described as an “epidemic” of violence, one so rampant that France’s soccer authorities have come to regard it as an existential threat. Vincent Labrune, the president of the French league, has called it nothing less than “a question of survival for our sport.”If that sounds hyperbolic, it is at least rooted in realism. There is a fear the violence could have financial ramifications; Roxana Maracineanu, the country’s sports minister, has said French soccer cannot “collectively afford” to fail to deliver the content the league’s broadcasters have paid for. But there is also concern that it could make France an inhospitable place for players to work, too.An incident involving Payet during a game at Nice in August led to on-field confrontations that drew in players, coaches, fans and security staff members.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt Serriere’s sentencing, Axel Daurat, a lawyer representing Payet and Marseille, testified that the player had suffered “significant” psychological impact as a result of being attacked twice in three months. “The fear will be there every time he puts the ball down for a corner,” Daurat said.But while the potential consequences are clear, there has been less progress on the causes. Labrune has suggested that the increase in disorder is best read as a reflection of the state of post-pandemic French society: “Anxious, worried, fractured, argumentative and — I have to say — a little crazy.”And yet that explanation does not quite withstand scrutiny. France is hardly alone in feeling a certain civic fractiousness as it emerges, haltingly and uncertainly, into an uncomfortable new reality. Most of Europe’s other major leagues, greeting that same reality, have not seen anything like the upsurge in violence Ligue 1 has faced.“It feels a little bit like cod psychology to say that it is to do with a tension in society manifesting in the stadium,” said Ronan Evain, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe. More likely, he said, is that the violence illustrates a structural, institutional failing.“It is like the clubs have lost a little bit of expertise,” he said. “In the incident between Lens and Lille, there was no buffer zone between the home and away fans. I have not seen that at a game in 20 years, maybe more. The clubs put a lot of emphasis on the Covid protocols for returning to the stadiums. Perhaps there was not enough focus on security.”Evain argued that may be connected to the loss of experienced stewards and security staff members during the pandemic, and he drew a parallel between the French experience and the scenes at Wembley Stadium in London in July, when thousands of ticketless fans stormed the gates when England played Italy in the Euro 2020 final. A sharply critical report this month documented how policing failures had left stadium security employees in an impossible — and potentially deadly — situation that day. “You cannot ask someone who is underpaid, undertrained and in poor working conditions to risk their health to stop someone going on the field,” Evain said.Nicolas Hourcade, a sociologist at the École Centrale de Lyon who specializes in fan movements, suggested that lack of expertise has been compounded by the financial difficulties faced by French teams. France, alone among Europe’s major leagues, chose not to conclude its pandemic-interrupted 2019-20 season, and its teams are still reeling from the subsequent collapse of the league’s broadcast deal.“It is possible the clubs did not invest enough in security,” he said, “which would explain why the measures were sometimes insufficient.”But while that provides a possible explanation for why French soccer has provided such fertile ground for the violence, it does not offer insight into the root of it. Maracineanu, the sports minister, has laid blame at the door of France’s ultra groups, urging their leaders to “control your troops.” But it is not quite so simple.At Serriere’s hearing, it emerged that he had been a Lyon fan for 15 years — though news reports noted he attended court in a Bayern Munich jersey — but was not a member of any organized group. He was not, in other words, an ultra.“There have been incidents involving ultra groups,” said Pierre Barthélemy, a lawyer who has acted on behalf of the ultra movement. He cited two, specifically, including the field invasion at Lens, which he said had been triggered by the presence of “Belgian hooligans” among the visiting Lille fans, and an incident at a game in Montpellier that the ultras were boycotting.Smoke from a flare in Montpellier. Fans also have thrown bottles, smoke bombs and punches this season.Eric Gaillard/Reuters“When the game was suspended at Nice, it was because the authorities had let people throw missiles on the field for 40 or 50 minutes,” Barthélemy said. “These are not organized incidents. They are spontaneous, and most are not coming from the ultras.”That, however, only makes them harder to police. France has some of the most draconian punishments for crowd disorder in Europe, Evain said, including the ability to close grandstands or even entire stadiums.He fears the current outbreak will be met by a “populist” response: increased calls for monitoring of fans in stadiums, and the greeting of any incident, even an individual action, with a collective punishment. At least one club owner has confided privately that he would agree to play behind closed doors if the issues continued.But perhaps more significant, the atomized nature of the incidents in France makes them harder to understand. “Violence caused by ultras and incidents caused by other fans are not related,” said Hourcade, the sociologist.Violence may be an organizational failure, he said. Or perhaps long-running grievances between ultra groups are resurfacing after lying dormant during the pandemic.But threading through it all is the sense that the stadium has become a place where lines can be crossed and taboos broken, and 3:54 into a game, when the trill of the whistle has barely faded and the game has barely begun, a fan can look at a bottle and, without ever knowing why, pick it up and hurl it at a player, and land another blow on the image French soccer presents to the world. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      For Mediapro and French Soccer, a Crisis With Many Fathers

      by

      When Jaume Roures and Mediapro walked away from a billion-dollar TV contract, Ligue 1 teams felt the squeeze. But he says they have a bigger problem.Sitting alone on a long table inside a committee room deep inside France’s national assembly, the Spanish businessman tried to explain why things had gone wrong, so very wrong.The businessman, Jaume Roures, the founder of a sprawling media company, was the latest figure — and perhaps the most significant — to be quizzed by lawmakers looking to understand why professional soccer in France had been brought to the edge of economic catastrophe by the collapse of a broadcasting contract. The deal, hailed as a financial game-changer when it was signed in 2018, was sold as one that would drastically shift the prospects of France’s top teams, moving them closer to their rivals in Spain and Italy, and perhaps even those in England’s Premier League, the world’s dominant domestic championship.Instead, the $1 billion contract with Mediapro, Roures’s Chinese-backed company, collapsed shortly after it had come into force in 2020. Roures suspended payments, calling for a renegotiation in light of the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The league disagreed, and Roures, unable to agree to new terms, pulled the plug and left France, a country where he once sought sanctuary after fighting against the dictatorship in his native Spain.The impact of the failure — for Roures and his company, for club executives and for French soccer — continues to be felt.Clubs that not so long ago were consumed by giddy thoughts of being able to compete with some of Europe’s best are now consumed with darker worries about how they are going to survive. Clubs offloaded young stars and reliable veterans in the summer transfer market where they could, sometimes for fees below market value as the market itself cratered, to cover for gaps on troubled balance sheets. And an auction this year to select Mediapro’s replacement as the league’s broadcaster ended with Amazon agreeing to pay less than a third of what Roures and Mediapro had once promised.At his hearing in September, the bald and bespectacled Roures looked more like a college professor than a media mogul. Looking down at a sheaf of papers laid out in front of him in Room 6242 of the Palais Bourbon, he began by delivering a meandering soliloquy in Spanish-accented French that touched upon several factors for why, in his view, things unraveled so spectacularly. He was still speaking in a monotone when one of the lawmakers, Cédric Roussel, intervened.“You give the impression that it was everybody else’s fault except Mediapro’s,” Roussel, sitting on a raised dais he shared with other members of the committee, said.Many in France remain furious over Roures’s exit, over how he shuttered a new channel set up to broadcast games, over how he could walk away from his commitments while paying only 100 million euros in compensation and over how his businesses have started to rebound from the pandemic while the futures of French clubs remain shrouded in doubt and uncertainty. “We could have a delayed catastrophe,” said Pierre Maes, a consultant and the author of “Le Business des Droits TV du Foot,” a book on the soccer rights market.Midfielder Eduardo Camavinga was one of the best prospects to leave Ligue 1 over the summer.Jean-Francois Monier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCamavinga, 18, was one of France’s best young prospects at Rennes. Now he plays for Real Madrid.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRoures, in an interview with The New York Times shortly before his audience with lawmakers, doubled down on his belief that his plan would have worked had the pandemic not changed everything. For it to work, though, Mediapro’s new channel, Telefoot, would have needed to attract three million subscribers, far more than the reported 300,000 it had managed to lure by the time of its collapse.Looking back at how things unfolded, Roures says now, it was the French league that erred in not renegotiating with him. He contends that his new offer — about 580 million euros, or about $675 million — was double the amount the league managed to extract from Amazon; that the government’s failure to tackle piracy also contributed to Mediapro’s hasty exit; and that Canal Plus, France’s top pay-TV operator, tried to abuse its dominant position.That stance may explain why he was unable to negotiate his contract with the league in the fall of 2020. Roures, said a team owner who also sits on the French league’s board, “lost all credibility, and no one wanted to hear about him.”A spokesman for the league did not respond to a request for comment.Meanwhile, Roures, who rose to prominence at the turn of the century when he secured domestic rights to the Spanish giants Barcelona and Real Madrid, lamented the price he had paid. “There has been significant reputational damage for us,” he said in the interview from Mediapro’s headquarters in Barcelona, Spain.Asked if any part of his foray into French soccer kept him up at night, he said no: “I sleep like a baby.”While in his interview Roures attempted to provide various explanations for what happened, he declined to point fingers directly at France’s clubs or its league. But he suggested his new view from the sideline offered him a glimpse of the structural problem that he suggested could leave the French league perpetually in the shadow of its rivals: Teams there, Roures said, are far too reliant on player trading to balance their books.“I would say it’s the only major European league where the role of transfers is fundamental, and that’s a major weakness,” he said. The higher television incomes he had promised, he said, would have allowed clubs, at least in theory, to keep their top stars for at least a little longer.Paris St.-Germain, which this summer added Lionel Messi, left, to a lineup that already boasted Kylian Mbappé and Neymar, is the one French club that seems impervious to economic crisis.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYet even amid the crisis, and the red ink splashed across balance sheets from Lille to Marseille, the French league has suddenly found itself more marketable than at any other point in its history. That is because of the presence of Paris St.-Germain, a team largely shielded from the financial turmoil that has engulfed its domestic rivals by the wealth of its owner, the government of Qatar, and strengthened by the summer signing of Lionel Messi.But Messi mania is not likely to be as profitable for the league as much as it will be for Amazon, which secured its cut price contract before the Argentine’s arrival.His arrival in France came shortly after that, and other contracts are locked in. “Amazon has got very lucky,” Roures said. “But the international rights for the championship have been sold up until 2025, and I don’t think it’s going to represent any greater income for the French league.” More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Soccer

      Messi, After Signing With P.S.G., Is Greeted With Cheers in Paris

      by

      The soccer great Lionel Messi, speaking at a news conference, said leaving Barcelona had been a “very hard moment” but he was excited to join his new club.PARIS — When Lionel Messi said goodbye to Barcelona, his home since childhood and the place he grew to become one of soccer’s greatest ever players, he was in tears.Three days later, when he was formally introduced on Wednesday by his new club, Paris St.-Germain, any tears in the crowd were expressions of joy.“It’s wonderful,” said Alexandre Marienne, 32, carrying his 8-year-old son Kamil on his shoulders. “He’s going to help us build something incredible — Paris is definitely competing with the big names now.”When Messi addressed reporters, sitting next to the club’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, he said leaving Barcelona was “a very hard moment” but that he was “very happy” to be in Paris.“I still want to play and I still want to win,” he said. “I want to keep growing and keep winning titles.”Messi, right, speaking alongside Paris St.-Germain’s president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, on Wednesday.Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was the culmination of stunning few days, in which Barcelona’s fans and players bid farewell in shock to the club’s greatest player, while in the French capital, P.S.G.’s fans hold their breaths, many unable to fathom what was happening.Messi repeated that he didn’t want to leave the club that made him who he is, that he had done “everything to stay.” His devoted fans wanted him to stay in Barcelona. The club wanted him to stay in Barcelona.But the financial forces that drive the game were greater than either individual or collective desire. The club could not afford Messi, even after he offered to cut his salary in half.So here he was, in Paris, about to play in the French Ligue 1, where financial rules akin to those that tied Barcelona’s hands will not come into force for a few more years.“The moment I arrived here, I felt very happy,” he said.Rarely has an athlete in the modern era been so associated with a single team. Maybe Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls is the closest comparison for American sports fans.But Messi’s connection to Barcelona ran deeper: He arrived at the club when he was only 13.Messi wept during a news conference in Barcelona on Sunday.Albert Gea/ReutersSo it was a strange sight to see him holding the jersey other than one sporting the familiar colors of Barcelona.But the legions of fans who greeted him in his new home city opened their arms in an embrace that, for the moment, overshadowed the darker message his transfer sent about the sport that Messi has so dominated.They did not come to discuss the danger posed by the immense advantage a small number of superrich clubs have in buying and keeping players.They came simply to see Messi.Men and women, many with their children by their side, came from all over Paris and other French cities far and near. Some were not from France at all. But they were all bonded by Messi.They gathered at the Parc des Princes, Paris St.-Germain’s stadium, to catch a glimpse of their talisman, who arrived in the French capital on Tuesday and signed a two-year deal with the French club.Mr. Messi called the ecstatic reception “crazy,” and said he was excited to get back to the business of playing soccer with some of the best players in the world.Messi in Paris on Tuesday, after arriving to sign a contract with his new club. Sarah Meyssonnier/ReutersFor many, the signing was no surprise: P.S.G., bankrolled by the state of Qatar, was only one of handful of clubs that could afford the 34-year-old star from Argentina.Yet countless supporters could still not believe it.“It’s just crazy stuff — we were not even dreaming of it,” said Yohan Aymon, a 19-year-old P.S.G. fan and forward for F.C. Sion, a Swiss club, who drove from his native Switzerland overnight.Since Qatar became the main stakeholder of Paris St.-Germain in 2012, supporters have watched the coming of a steady stream of the world’s most expensive players.From Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Neymar, David Beckham to Kylian Mbappé, Gianluigi Buffon to Sergio Ramos, no club has signed as many stars in the past 10 years.That has drawn criticism from countless clubs, players and managers in France and abroad, who argue that the competition is now unfair and biased toward state-sponsored teams like P.S.G. or Manchester City.But none of them, it seems, compares to Messi’s arrival. Fans lined up around the stadium at dawn on Wednesday, chanting and shouting as a giant photo of the player adorned the Parc des Princes, less than a day after Messi’s face was removed from the Camp Nou in Barcelona.“He made football magic, beautiful, and he’s a winner,” P.S.G.’s president said about Messi, as he stood next to him at a news conference on Wednesday. “There’s no secret he’s the best player in the world.”Messi will earn 35 million euros a season, or about $41 million, and will wear the number 30, which he had at Barcelona from 2004 to 2006. Neymar will keep his number 10.“We are entering a new dimension,” said Mr. Marienne, who said he had moved his vacation in southern France with his family to see Messi. “P.S.G.’s possibilities seem unlimited now.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      As France Chases Title at Euros, Its League Faces a $400 Million Hole

      by

      French soccer teams could face economic disaster after a television partner said it would refuse to honor its contract. Transfers, salaries and budgets hang in the balance.French soccer’s new television deal was supposed to save the league and its clubs from a financial meltdown.Instead, it may have made a bad situation worse.Soon after France’s top soccer league, Ligue 1, announced this month that it had enticed Amazon to become its lead broadcaster, its longtime television partner, Canal Plus, reacted with fury.Canal Plus would neither pay for nor broadcast the two games per week it owned the rights to, the company said. Not at the premium price in its contracts, at least. And certainly not when Amazon was paying roughly $100 million less for four times as many games.“Canal Plus will not, therefore, be broadcasting Ligue 1,” the company said in a statement.The implications of the Canal Plus threat for the cash-strapped French teams could not be more serious. Already reeling from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the collapse last year of their league’s $1 billion television contract, clubs across France that had been planning to trim their budgets now face an urgent crisis.While Amazon has agreed to broadcast eight games a week for little more than $300 million per season, Canal Plus was on the hook to pay almost $400 million for the two games a week it had picked up in a previous rights auction. Now that it is refusing to pay, many clubs have entered the summer player-trading market worried less about sales and signings than about the possibility of bankruptcy.And they may have only weeks to find a way out.The chaos behind the scenes at the French league is in sharp contrast to the international image of French soccer, burnished by the success of its World Cup-winning men’s team. France started its quest for the European championship last week with a serene display against Germany, tied Hungary on Saturday in Budapest and remains the favorite to lift the trophy next month.Benjamin Pavard and France were held to a draw by Hungary on Saturday but the team remains a favorite to win Euro 2020.Pool photo by Bernadett SzaboMost of the players on France’s Euro 2020 roster play for clubs outside of France, but nearly all got their start with French teams. Now those same clubs are trying to plan for a future they cannot predict.Can they afford to sign new players to strengthen their squads? Can they even meet the payrolls for the ones they have? Or is it wiser now to be sellers — even in a depressed pandemic market? The answers may determine how many teams enter the season with their financial futures in doubt.“If you are not able to renegotiate player salaries you are risking bankruptcy — it’s as simple as that,” said Pierre Maes, the author of “Le Business des Droits TV du Foot,” a book on the soccer rights market.The deal with Amazon came as a shock to many who thought that a monthslong rights-fee dispute between the league and Canal Plus — a league partner since the network’s inception in 1984 — would be resolved by a win at auction for the French network. But Amazon was picked over a joint offer from Canal Plus and its Qatari partner, beIN Sports.Canal Plus executives have publicly expressed concern about Amazon, with Maxime Saada, the network’s chief executive, telling the business publication Challenges that the power of Amazon posed the “biggest danger” to the business model of Canal Plus. “We have to dodge them permanently,” he said. Perhaps underlining that power, a top French soccer official said the league was not prepared to turn down an agreement with a company as significant as Amazon, believing that a bet on the e-commerce giant was a bet on the future.But the outcome has introduced yet more uncertainty for a league that has been in a tailspin since it announced in 2020 that it would not be able to complete the 2019-20 season because of the pandemic. France was the only one of Europe’s top leagues to take the measure.Almost as soon as it returned to the field for a new season, though, the league was quickly convulsed by a second — and perhaps far more serious — crisis. Late last year, Mediapro, the Chinese-backed company with which the league had signed a record-breaking television contract, announced it could not meet its commitments. Less than three months after the start of its three-year deal, Mediapro surrendered the rights to French soccer and walked away.Canal Plus picked up the pieces, taking over Mediapro’s games at a discount, but it soon found itself in its own dispute with the league.The Canal Plus chief executive Maxime Saada, who said the company would not pay a multimillion-dollar rights fee or even broadcast French soccer games.Pool photo by Thomas SamsonAfter learning that the price Amazon had paid for the rights to its matches was lower than the one Canal Plus was contracted to pay for fewer (and less high-profile) games, the network argued that it should no longer have to spend 332 million euros ($394 million) for the rights that it sub-licenses from the Qatari broadcaster beIN.“Canal Plus will not pay 332 million euros for 20 percent of the matches, when Amazon broadcasts 80 percent for 250 million euros,” Saada told L’Équipe.While in many ways the situation in which Ligue 1 finds itself is particularly French, the collapse of the rights market in the country is only the most recent example of the plummeting value of soccer rights in Europe more generally. In recent auctions for television rights in Italy and Germany, the leagues in both countries ended up getting less than in their previous deals.England’s Premier League, the world’s richest domestic competition, required special government dispensation to roll over an agreement with its current partners to avoid a risky auction. And Spain’s top league will change the way it sells its rights to mitigate against what is likely to be a major drop-off in the price it can command.“My conclusion is that in France the bubble has burst and it’s actually what I’m forecasting to become a reality in other countries, too,” Maes said.The value of the Canal Plus rights is substantially lower since the collapse of the Mediapro deal, Canal Plus argued before the latest auction. It demanded that the league renegotiate the price or include its rights in the auction to find Mediapro’s replacement.The league refused and a court in France sided with it, saying Canal Plus had failed to demonstrate how it had been harmed.But while the network is preparing new litigation, and contends it can make its case, Amazon and the league are looking forward.“Ligue 1 football has a new partner and an exciting future,” Alex Green, the managing director of Amazon’s sports programming for Europe, said after the company’s biggest soccer deal to date was announced. “We won’t let you down.”For France’s top-flight teams, the joy of having a new, deep-pocketed partner has been quickly tempered by the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars from Canal Plus.Some French club executives, like the Olympique Lyonnais president Jean Michel Aulas, predict that Canal Plus will back down. “I do not see at all how Canal can deprive itself of having access to Ligue 1,” said Aulas, a member of the French league’s television rights committee.But, according to senior Canal Plus executives, the company is standing firm. Its first payment is due Aug. 5. At the moment, it has no plans to pay it.The rupture is significant. The relationship with Canal Plus — which has overcome previous disputes — has underpinned the economics of the French league for decades. The strain of the pandemic even led to intervention from government officials, including President Emmanuel Macron, who called on the network to play its role when the league’s finances started to teeter.Lille won the French club championship this season even as it moved to trim its budget.Denis Charlet/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLigue 1’s president, Vincent Labrune, met with Canal Plus’s Saada several times before the auction, and warned him that a lowball bid for the broader rights package on offer could lose out should a rival emerge. Saada, and Canal Plus, considered that unlikely after the league failed to sell the rights in a January auction in which neither Canal Plus nor beIN participated. But the bad blood between the league and its main partner started to escalate.The bitterness, according to many commentators, clouded the negotiations and led to an outcome in which the only winner appears to be Amazon, which through the deal secured majority rights to a top European soccer league for the first time.“It’s very opportunistic because Amazon has profited from a very emotional situation,” Maes said.A league board member involved in the decision said Ligue 1 was confident Canal Plus would have to honor its contract, and that under French law action could be taken within 15 days if the money is not paid.But for French clubs who need to decide now on budgets, players and plans for next season, that may be too late. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Soccer

      Facing P.S.G., Lille Clings to First Place as the Bottom Falls Out

      by

      Lille will play its deep-pocketed rival Paris St.-Germain for the league lead on Saturday. But not even a title may spare it from a financial reckoning.On the surface, the pitch was a convincing one. Last year, the owners of Lille O.S.C. commissioned a graphic designer to produce a glossy prospectus, one intended to entice an investor into buying out their stake in the French soccer club.There are dozens of these documents swirling around soccer’s financial netherworld at any given time, passed around by the army of bankers, lawyers, private equity investors, deal-makers and middlemen who serve as gatekeepers to the handful of individuals both wealthy and foolhardy enough to buy and sell teams.Generally, pitches like the one about Lille are treated with both caution and cynicism, but this one probably would have been worth a second glance. The club’s infrastructure was sound: It had a large training facility at Luchin, and a capacious, modern stadium. Its location, too, was fertile ground for an ambitious, dynamic sort of a team: at the center of a transport nexus connecting London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, in the center of a part of northern France that contains the headquarters of dozens of corporations and a population of two million people, almost a third of them younger than 20.The centerpiece of the sales document, though, was Lille’s squad itself. The club’s real value, the prospectus claimed, lay in its talent. Every year, the club had invested substantial sums in crops of bright, young prospects, thanks in no small part to the work of Luis Campos, the Portuguese recruitment guru who oversaw the team’s transfer activity.Each influx of players was referred to as an “acquisition vintage”; as with wine, the idea was that the prospects would get better with age. The club estimated that its squad, at the time, had a cumulative transfer value of around $420 million. Its ceiling, though, was much higher: If all the players developed as they should, the club claimed it was sitting on a pool of talent worth as much as $1 billion.In ordinary circumstances, this weekend would be the moment that Lille’s approach was vindicated. On Saturday, Lille travels to Paris St.-Germain for the most significant game of the Ligue 1 season: The teams are tied atop the standings, with the P.S.G. side built for hundreds of million of dollars, the one that can call on Neymar and Kylian Mbappé and the rest, ahead of Lille only on goal difference.But for Lille, the season when everything came together is also the season it all fell apart.A Lille fan last fall. Stadium closures have added to the team’s financial problems.Pascal Rossignol/ReutersThe Gathering StormGérard López, Lille’s former owner, used to boast that if his team was not “the best in the world in trading players, we’re probably in the top three, four or five.” This season should have been his proof.But if anything — and through no fault of their own — the market value of Lille’s players has not only fallen this season, but it has also dropped to such an extent that, in December, López had no choice but to cede control of the club.The end game arrived just before Christmas. López was summoned to London to meet with Lille’s two main creditors, JP Morgan Chase and Elliott Management, the activist investment firm founded and run by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.In that meeting, the French sports newspaper L’Equipe reported, López tried everything he could to broker a deal to pay back the loans — worth around $140 million — that were set to come due this summer. He suggested a five-year financial restructuring, and proposed bringing on board an investor from the Middle East. He did not, it seems, want to give up Lille easily.Whenever he could, he found time to call Christophe Galtier, Lille’s coach, to update him on the progress of the talks. “He kept me informed of the situation last night,” Galtier said in December. “We talked a lot, when it was possible to talk.” Galtier was clearly touched: He dedicated the team’s win against Dijon the next day to the man who had brought him on board in 2017.Lille’s manager, Christophe Galtier, in an empty stadium last month.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesElliott and JP Morgan, though, were unmoved. López’s reign was over. The director Marc Ingla soon followed him out the door. Eventually, so would Campos. In their stead, almost immediately, came a company called Callisto Sporting SARL, a subsidiary of an investment firm called Merlyn Partners.Both companies are registered in Luxembourg. Both are linked to Maarten Petermann, a former European head of special situations at JP Morgan. Olivier Létang, a veteran soccer executive, was named Lille’s president. The creditors’ decision, and the swiftness of their action, was rooted in the unavoidable fact that the financial reality of French soccer had shifted too much for López to be able to meet his commitments.Like every club in Ligue 1 — with the exception of Qatar-funded P.S.G. — Lille was facing a cash-flow crisis. The league’s decision to cancel last season meant it had forfeited a tranche of broadcast revenue. Stadiums had been empty, at that stage, for almost nine months, and there was no sign that fans would be permitted to return any time soon. And, most pernicious of all, the league’s new television deal had collapsed; if a replacement could not be found, French domestic soccer was facing ruin.Lille’s circumstances, though, were particularly perilous. López’s tenure had always been something of a roller coaster; the club had been sanctioned on several occasions by the D.N.C.G., the body that oversees the economic health of France’s soccer teams, and at one point was threatened with relegation because of its precarious finances.Its release valve was always Campos’s seemingly never-ending pipeline of talent. In the summer of 2019, Lille had sold players — including the wing Nicolas Pépé, to Arsenal — for almost $180 million. A year later, even at the height of the pandemic, it had managed to turn a profit of $71 million in the transfer market.Despite those impressive returns, the club was barely keeping its head above water. Quite how it burned through so much money is not entirely clear, although the considerable running cost of its stadium is generally regarded as a significant factor. In 2018-19, the club posted an operating loss of $77 million. The year before, that deficit was $120 million.In a bull market, the club’s creditors had been prepared to tolerate those figures. That changed as 2020 became 2021, as revenues cratered, and as French soccer teetered on the brink. The club was heading for “bankruptcy in January,” according to Létang. This time, Lille could not sell its way out of trouble.Lille’s American forward, Timothy Weah, with his Canadian teammate, Jonathan David.Stephane Mahe/ReutersThe Midas TouchThe squad that has brought Lille into contention for its first French title since 2011 — and, more impressively, its first since the Qatari investment in P.S.G. fundamentally altered Ligue 1’s competitive balance — is testament not only to the deft and astute management of Galtier, but also to the keen eye of Campos.There is a reason that even José Mourinho, not a man given to complimenting other humans, is happy to talk about his friend’s “great career.” Campos, after all, is the technical director who pieced together the Monaco team that made the semifinals of the Champions League in 2017 and was then sold across the Continent for the better part of a billion euros.His work at Lille was, quietly, no less impressive, even if he was never, technically, an employee of the club. Instead, he was employed by a company called Scoutly, which was wholly owned by Victory Soccer, the vehicle through which López and Ingla owned Lille.López insisted that this Byzantine approach was necessary so that Campos could operate with “independence” in the market. Regardless, Lille benefited from the arrangement. Its squad is replete with the fruits of Campos’s labor: Boubakary Soumaré and Jonathan Ikoné, spotted in the reserve ranks at P.S.G.; Zeki Celik, plucked from the obscurity of the Turkish second division; Renato Sanches, offered a shot at rejuvenation after four years in the wilderness; and the two crown jewels, the most salable assets, the Dutch defender Sven Botman and the Canadian forward Jonathan David.The belief that they might, together, one day be worth as much as that Monaco team of Mbappé and Bernardo Silva and Fabinho and the rest was, of course, overstated. That assumption rested on the idea that every single player would reach his maximum value, but it was, for a while, an explicable delusion.That changed as soon as the pandemic struck, and it calcified as the scale of French soccer’s financial crisis was laid bare. Ligue 1 expects to sign a new television deal in the coming weeks, almost certainly with Canal Plus, the broadcaster it ditched last summer.Lille’s team has always been its biggest asset.Michel Spingler/Associated PressBroadcast money will bring some respite for the country’s clubs, but it will not fill the hole left by the empty promises of Mediapro. The teams of Ligue 1, then, are hurriedly trying to cut their budgets accordingly. Several already have agreed to pay cuts with their players. Lyon has offered a reduction in exchange for stock options.Most, though, will still need to sell players, trading on Ligue 1’s self-styled reputation as the “league of talents.” The problem is not only that prices will be depressed by the fact that so many teams in France need to raise funds, but also that few clubs in Europe retain their purchasing power.It was that, ultimately, that forced the hand of Lille’s creditors: Campos might still have provided players who can be sold, but in a market likely to be saturated by cut-price deals, Lille can no longer rely on premium fees.What happens next — what happens this summer — is not yet clear. Létang has said little beyond an insistence that the club cannot rely on qualification for next season’s Champions League for its financial health. Stability, he said, will be his watchword. The players have, as yet, not been alerted to a looming fire sale.A place in Europe would go some way, of course, to boosting the club’s finances. A French title, combined with a good showing in Europe next season, might help increase demand for some of the more recent acquisition vintages. Like wine, they will get better with age. The problem, now, is that what is inside the bottle matters rather less than the amount someone is prepared — or able — to pay for it. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      French Soccer Faces Financial Crisis After MediaPro Pulls Plug

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrench Soccer Faces Financial Crisis After Broadcaster Pulls the PlugThe sudden collapse of a billion-dollar television contract has created a serious cash crisis for French clubs as the January transfer window nears.MediaPro paid a record price to broadcast matches in France’s top soccer leagues in 2018. Last week, it walked away from the deal.Credit…Charles Platiau/ReutersDec. 15, 2020, 2:00 a.m. ETThe record-setting television deal was, in hindsight, far too good to be true.The billion euros the upstart media company had promised to pay to televise French soccer matches each year represented an increase of 60 percent on the league’s previous television deal, and much more than any other bidder had offered. It was a sum so large — about $1.2 billion a year — that it led officials from the league and the club executives on its board to ignore obvious warning signs; to brush aside the fact that the company making the offer, MediaPro, had no history in French soccer; and to close an agreement without the type of bank guarantees that might have ensured that all that money would eventually arrive.And then the deal simply vanished.Last week, arbitration talks between the Ligue de Football Professionnel (L.F.P.), the governing body for professional soccer in France, and MediaPro, a Spanish broadcaster now controlled by Chinese interests, ended with the company handing back the four years of rights under its control and less than a third of the more than 300 million euros it owes for games this season.The resolution has left league officials frantically searching for a new television partner, and teams facing a very different financial future.For the clubs, the repercussions may be immediate. Instead of being flush with enough cash to build teams to rival those in Germany and Spain, most French teams are facing restructuring measures, starting with the sale of players when Europe’s player trading window reopens in January.MediaPro’s chief executive, Jaume Roures, had bet billions that he could resell the French soccer rights his company had acquired to other partners.Credit…Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOne team director described the situation as “a total disaster.” The chief executive of another one said the situation — coupled with the continuing financial effects of the coronavirus pandemic — was “hugely damaging.” The president of the French champion Paris St.-Germain, Nasser al-Khelaifi, asked the league’s new leaders to conduct a full investigation into the process that ended in catastrophe for France’s teams. Al-Khelaifi is also chairman of beIN Media Group, a rival to MediaPro for rights.What may hurt most, at least from the teams’ perspective, is that it is a crisis of their own making.The trouble began in the spring. As all of Europe’s major soccer leagues plotted ways to reboot, the French league announced it would be the only one not to complete its suspended campaign.A government decree ended the season early, forcing Ligue 1 to tap a national loan program to ensure its teams did not fall into financial ruin. Only the prospect of record-breaking broadcast revenues, set to take effect with the start of the MediaPro deal this season, softened the blow.The agreement, signed in 2018, had been trumpeted as groundbreaking then, a contract worth more than a billion euros per season (about $1.2 billion) for rights to matches in France’s top two domestic divisions. That symbolic figure was one that team executives had long hoped to realize, and one so large that it led them to part ways with the league’s partner, Canal+.But the financial boost — MediaPro had agreed to pay almost 60 percent more than the previous agreement — also led teams to spend more on recruitment in the last off-season, a decision that many are now regretting.“They had anticipated the higher TV rates, and this comes as a shock for most people,” said the chief executive, who asked not to be identified because talks to stabilize the league’s finances continue. He predicted some clubs would look to foreign investors to bail them out in return for heavily discounted equity or outright sales.The French league includes world-class players like Kylian Mbappé and brands like Paris St.-Germain and Olympique Lyonnais, but many of its clubs struggle to match the spending of rivals in England, Spain and Germany.Credit…Yoan Valat/EPA, via ShutterstockSome of the comfort that led the clubs to spend freely can be traced to ebullient comments made by MediaPro’s chief executive, Jaume Roures, at the height of the pandemic’s first wave in the spring, when global sports had stopped and the French league’s main broadcast partners at the time, Canal+ and beIN Sports, announced they would suspend their rights payments.In April, Roures, in an interview with the sports daily L’Equipe, vowed to take over the broadcast rights to French games early if the season restarted in the summer and the league’s partners, Canal+ and beIN Sports, opted out. “To be a good Samaritan is to pay what you owe,” Roures said at the time.But a closer look at the deal French league officials signed with MediaPro, a company started by Roures and two partners that is now largely controlled and financed by a little-known Chinese group, suggests several red flags were ignored in pursuit of the richest offer.MediaPro would not have been allowed to enter the auction for the French rights, for example, had the league not changed the tender process to allow agencies like MediaPro, which did not have a platform in France to broadcast games, to take part.Then, after the agreement was struck, it took several months for an official contract to be signed, and when it was it did not include the type of bank guarantees that would have proved MediaPro would be able to make good on the payments it had promised.French soccer officials are scrambling to find a new television partner before the end of the year.Credit…Daniel Cole/Associated PressThere were other warning signs, too. Another huge deal signed by MediaPro, the stunning capture of rights to Italy’s Serie A, collapsed around the same time it was in talks about its French acquisition. Part of the reason was the company was unable to provide a guarantee for much of the amount it had promised the league.And four years ago, the company’s business practices came under further scrutiny when a United States affiliate, Imagina Media Audiovisual, was implicated in the FIFA bribery scandal. Earlier this year, Gerard Romy, one of MediaPro’s founders, was charged with wire fraud, money laundering and racketeering conspiracy in connection with the case.Roures had looked to blame the impact of the coronavirus when he called for the French league to renegotiate its MediaPro deal in October. But with stadiums largely off-limits to fans, viewing figures for soccer have remained robust across Europe; in some cases, ratings have soared.Didier Quillot, the L.F.P. chief executive who led the tender process, left his post in September with a payment of about $1.8 million, much of which was based on his negotiating the deal with MediaPro. Quillot in recent days has said he is prepared to repay any bonus he received that was linked to the rights sale.MediaPro’s troubles started when it failed to secure 100 percent of the rights, losing a crucial package that included the first pick of the week’s top game to beIN Sports, a Qatar-backed broadcaster. BeIN sold those rights to Canal+, reducing the need for the network, France’s biggest pay television operator, to make a deal with MediaPro for the other games.Unable to find a home for its matches, MediaPro started a subscription service for them, Téléfoot.Credit…Bertrand Guay/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat left MediaPro holding expensive rights without the most viable outlet willing to buy them. Seeking a way out, it sought to start its own channel, Téléfoot, which had little to offer subscribers beyond the matches it had bought. Sales of subscriptions offered on other, smaller platforms failed to reach meaningful numbers, though, leaving MediaPro to burn through millions of dollars with little hope of breaking even.Faced with that crisis, MediaPro failed to make a payment of 172 million euros ($208 million) when the French league started its new season in October. It skipped another one for 152.5 million euros this month.MediaPro moved to defend itself from litigation by taking advantage of new laws passed to protect companies during the coronavirus crisis. Unable to insist on recouping what it was owed, the French league was forced into a mediation process that ended last week with MediaPro agreeing to return only 100 million euros ($121 million).“Clubs are desperately in need of cash; that’s why the league has accepted this very bad offer from MediaPro,” said Pierre Maes, a consultant and author of “Le Business des Droits TV du Foot,” a book on the soccer rights market.The league — which has so far kept its teams afloat with bank loans in lieu of the missing broadcast payments — is now scrambling to find a television partner, most likely Canal+, to come to the rescue. One thing is almost certain: The price the league will be forced to accept will not be celebrated in the manner the MediaPro deal was.“Whatever can be done to deliver cash to clubs, they’ll do it,” Maes said. He predicted that any new agreement for the rights now could bring about half of what MediaPro had promised to pay.“Canal+ is today in a position to correct the market,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More