Welcome to issue #075 of Contemporary Football, your inside look at how the game really works behind the scenes.
Monday to Friday, you’ll uncover a new perspective on football business, and sometimes a deeper story that sharpens your thinking and gives you an edge in the beautiful game.
If you need support on your football journey, just write me.
In 2018, French football believed it had solved its biggest problem.
Domestic TV rights jumped to €1.15bn per year.
Up 60%.
For a moment, Ligue 1 felt like it had been promoted to another economic league.
Seven years later, that number tells a different story.
The real mistake
The mistake wasn’t selling the rights.
The mistake was who carried the risk.
Almost €780m per year depended on one new broadcaster.
Big promises. Few guarantees.
Then payments slowed.
Then they stopped.
The contract collapsed.
Amazon stepped in at around €250m.
Later DAZN at roughly €400m.
Then came partial payments.
Disputes.
Exit clauses.
One thing never changed:
French football never controlled distribution.
It only controlled the auction.
The model that broke
For twenty years, European football followed one assumption:
TV money always grows.
New platforms.
More subscribers.
More competition.
Every rights cycle would be higher than the previous one.
France discovered something real.
When one contract carries most of your income, it’s not only revenue.
It’s concentration risk.
And concentration risk eventually breaks.
The shift
Today Ligue 1 is running its own streaming platform.
€14.99 per month.
Direct to consumer.
About 600,000 subscribers joined in the first week.
Ligue 1 is trading peak price for control.
When you distribute the product yourself, you accept new problems:
Customer acquisition.
Piracy.
Technology costs.
But you remove one very dangerous risk:
No broadcaster can suddenly remove half your income.
The lesson
French football didn’t misjudge one broadcaster.
It misjudged the structure.
Maximising the next TV cycle looks intelligent.
Reducing dependency is smarter.
They are different strategies.
One optimises valuation.
The other protects survival.
The real question
Imagine domestic TV rights in your league drop 40% tomorrow.
What breaks first in your club?
Your wage bill?
Your transfer model?
Your club finances?
France simply reached the stress test first.
Other leagues will reach it later.
For example, the Premier League is launching a direct-to-consumer solution in Singapore.
It makes me think that the clubs that survive the next decade will not be the ones with the biggest TV contracts.
They will be the ones that never depended on one number.
See you on Monday,
Federico