Is France's Ligue 1 Heading for Financial Armageddon After Mammoth £1 Billion Loss in 2024/25?

For decades, European football has been dominated by its ‘big five’ domestic competitions: the English Premier League, LaLiga, Serie A, German Bundesliga and Ligue 1.

Clubs within these leagues have produced most of the continent’s best players, or at least had the resources to buy them. For the most part, they have enjoyed a near monopoly on the Champions League and Europa League trophies.

But that big five could be about to become a rather less sizeable fantastic four…

French football is in the midst of perhaps its worst financial crisis ever. The Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), which essentially operates Ligue 1 and the second-tier division Ligue 2, revealed that it suffered an operating loss of £250 million during the 2023/24 season.

And, if you thought that was bad, they’re estimating a further loss of an eye-watering £1 billion in 2024/25… putting the future of top-tier French football in doubt.

So where has it all gone wrong… and will there even be a Ligue 1, in its present form, in the years to come?

Dazed and Confused

It all started with the rather ambitious plan of signing a media rights deal that would have netted the LFP a cool £1 billion per season.

And, as unlikely as that seems, the French authority was able to secure a good chunk of that when, in 2018, they penned an agreement with Spanish broadcasting firm Mediapro and BeIN Sports that would see them net £2.75 billion over the course of four years.

The challenge was that Mediapro had earlier signed a similar deal with Serie A, but that was canned when Lega Serie A became convinced that they didn’t have the money to finance the contract. 

However, the Ligue de Football Professionnel did not heed the warning…

The deal went live in time for the 2020/21 season, but after just a couple of months, Mediapro began to miss the agreed payment schedule. In fact, its rumoured that they paid the money owed to the LFP in just the first two months of the four-year deal.

Mediapro, unable to find the cash, asked to be released from their agreement with the LFP early.

TV viewing figures of Ligue 1 games aren’t particularly great, as a rule, and so the LFP struggled to find a broadcaster willing to replace Mediapro. In the end, DAZN was persuaded… however, at a fraction of the cost of the previous deal, paying around 60% less than its predecessor.

Unfortunately, many Ligue 1 clubs had budgeted based on the Mediapro-sized deal, which left them haplessly out of pocket.

And it wasn’t long before DAZN started to get frustrated too. They were unable to secure the subscriber numbers they needed to make any money on the deal, with only 400,000 customers signing up, despite a series of price cut promotions.

DAZN sought to renegotiate the terms of the deal, the LFP refused and things turned nasty: DAZN stopped making their monthly payments into French football, withholding £30 million back in February.

The British firm has threatened to sue the LFP for ‘deception of the merchandise’, which presumably means that the French organisation had massaged the truth about the number of subscribers that DAZN would procure.

Having put the situation to owners of its Ligue 1 clubs, it was decided that the LFP would end their partnership with DAZN four years early at the conclusion of the 2024/25 campaign.

So now the LFP has to find a replacement broadcaster for next season and beyond, which given that DAZN called them out on an inability to turn a profit on their rights package, is unlikely to be straightforward. Any contract penned will unlikely get near to the £400 million that DAZN paid… let alone the £1 billion a year that Mediapro were supposed to pump into the coffers.

It's an almighty mess that has led to a mammoth black hole opening up in the finances of French football.

Lyon Tamed

Any football club that considers itself bulletproof from financial pressures should consider the monumental fall from grace of Bordeaux.

Ligue 1 champions in 2009 and Coupe de France winners in 2013, little over a decade Bordeaux find themselves in the fourth tier of French football; so bad was their financial position, the administrative wing of the LFP decided to enforce a double relegation on them for the 2024/25 season.

While that is a rare case, it sets a dangerous precedent for formerly giant French clubs. Consider now the perils faced by Lyon, who face an administrative relegation of their own to Ligue 2, despite sitting just four points behind Marseille in second place heading into the business end of the campaign.

They announced debts of more than £400 million back in November, despite the presence of wealthy benefactor John Textor as owner. If the LFP is not satisfied that they’ve cleared enough debt by the summer, Lyon, who have given world football Karim Benzema, Alexandre Lacazette, Samuel Umtiti and Rayan Cherki via their academy and reached the Champions League semi-finals in 2020 could suffer an enforced relegation.

There’s a feeling that other big clubs in France are on the precipice, too. It’s been reported that Sir Jim Ratcliffe wants to divest his controlling stake in Nice having taken up his Manchester United shareholding, while Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev has apparently put Monaco up for sale.

And make no mistake, if the Qatari aristocracy decides that they want to invest more in domestic projects (as they have alluded to) than attempt to bankroll PSG’s seemingly doomed attempt to win the Champions League, the Parisians may also find that their wealthy investors seek pastures new, too.

Quite simply, French football is on the brink of financial ruin. It has one time-served revenue stream, selling players, with billions banked over the years via its conveyor belt of young talent.

But overseas clubs aren’t daft. Knowing the parlous state of many French clubs’ finances, they can bid much lower than the going rate for their best players, securing a bargain for themselves and leaving the selling club out of pocket.

And that market force, allied to the absence of a lucrative TV deal, could see Ligue 1 fall from grace significantly in the years ahead. 

Click here for our Discounted Account Offer. Access updated previews and analysis on up to 5 tournaments for 30 days.