French professional football is sinking ever-deeper into a financial mire from which it will be hard to free itself. After one its best-known clubs, the Girondins de Bordeaux – whose owner’s dubious dealings Mediapart had flagged up – recently plummeted to the amateur level of the game for financial reasons, other key names of the French game are also reeling.
Attention has now turned to Olympique Lyonnais (OL), once held up in the 2000s and 2010s as the soundest business model in the league under its long-serving president Jean-Michel Aulas.
The club from eastern France was taken over in 2023 by the American businessman John Textor, a multi-club owner fond of debt financing, and is racking up losses. OL is now under the watcful gaze of French football’s financial watchdog, the Direction Nationale de Contrôle et de Gestion (DNCG), which has threatened the club with relegation for financial reasons. On June 24th, the DNCG will grill the club’s owner in the hope he can remove doubts over state of its books.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Such last-chance hearings at the end of the season are becoming the norm for the DNCG, so fragile is the business model of Ligue 1 clubs. The trouble is that their running costs, and especially player wages, are baked in well above what they earn. Most clubs count on large transfer fees to make up the shortfall, but these deals do not always materialise.
As a result, club losses are piling up: for the 2024–2025 season, the DNCG’s boss Jean-Marc Mickeler is braced for a loss of 1.2 billion euros across Ligue 1 and Ligue 2. Last season had already seen losses of 1 billion euros, on an overall turnover of 2.9 billion euros.
One does not need to be an expert to see that French football is in a bad way. And, sadly, the recent plan by the Ministry of Sport and French football's governing body, the Fédération française de football (FFF), to bring in a new form of leadership - with a company made up of all the clubs to handle TV rights and competitions instead of professional football's governing body the Ligue de football professionnel (LFP) - is unlikely to shift the dial on the state of the sport's finances, at least not in the short term.
For French football's financial problems run deep. Apart from Paris Saint-Germain, which is in a league of its own thanks to backing from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and perhaps AS Monaco,which is bankrolled by a Russian billionaire, all clubs are facing a tricky financial situation, and some worse than others.
From the collapse of the media rights contract with broadcast group Mediapro to the crazy deal signed with the private equity firm CVC, not forgetting the Covid crisis, French pro football has suffered from both external blows and self-inflicted blunders, landing itself in a financial mire from which it is now struggling to extricate itself.
Mediapro and CVC scandals
It is hard to say exactly when French football went off the rails, but the Mediapro debacle was one episode which helped trigger it.
Ligue 1 had long leaned on its traditional broadcast partner Canal+, a group which for years paid over the odds for top-flight football rights to keep its subscribers. But in 2018 the clubs and the LFP wanted even more. They signed a deal for the 2020–2024 broadcast rights worth a hefty 1.15 billion euros a year, a rise of nearly 60%, with a new broadcaster, the Spanish group Mediapro, who were supposed to stump up three-quarters of the cash. French clubs believed this would help them keep pace with the English Premier League, whose TV rights had already soared to 2.3 billion euros a year between 2016 and 2019.
But it turned out the club chairmen and LFP bosses had eyes bigger than their stomachs. Mediapro, who in 2018 were already under suspected to have money problems, in fact turned out to be penniless. It missed payments before pulling out of France in 2021, blowing a huge hole in the clubs' finances, as half of their budgets – aside from transfer fees – were by then reliant on television money.
Though Amazon stepped in to pick up the rights, the sum was far below what Mediapro had pledged. In the end, the total shortfall for clubs was nearly 500 million euros a year, which was a hammer blow.
Then came the pandemic, which hit turnstile receipts hard. By the end of the 2021–2022 season, French football finances were in tatters: 1.2 billion euros in operating losses and a net loss of more than 600 million euros.
But one big mistake was followed by another. To fill the black hole left by Mediapro, LFP president Vincent Labrune turned to a Jersey-based private equity firm called CVC Capital Partners. It should be said from the outset that CVC is not the kind of group that is best-known for its ethics in the world of finance.
With little leverage in talks with this financial big hitter, the LFP and the clubs signed what one might fairly call a Faustian pact; its content was set out in sharp detail in the report of an inquiry by the French Senate into the issue. Made public in October 2024, the report caused quite a stir.
The deal was this: CVC would inject 1.5 billion euros into French football in three tranches in 2022, 2023 and 2024. This consisted of 1.2 billion to the clubs to plug their losses, and about 200 million to settle debts accrued during Covid. This gave clubs a breather in the short term; but at a heavy price long-term.
In return, CVC have secured a cut of French football’s takings, mainly TV and commercial revenue, in the form of a “priority dividend” set at 13%. Nor is this already high rate fixed: if CVC’s growth forecasts for club revenue falls short, under the agreement the share it can take goes up. “CVC is not an ordinary shareholder. Its stake gives it special rights over French football’s income,” said the report’s authors, senators Laurent Lafon from the centre-right UDI party and Michel Savin of the rightwing Les Républicains (LR).
In the first two seasons, 2022–2023 and 2023–2024, the deal proved painless for the clubs. CVC, playing the lofty benefactor, agreed to delay collecting its dividends (105 million euros in total) until mid-2025. But it is now that the reckoning begins.
According to Mediapart's calculations, which are based on DNCG statements and the Senate report, CVC is set to take 72 million euros in dividends from French pro football for the 2024–2025 season. On top of that comes a further 52.5 million euros; half of the unpaid dividends from 2023 and 2024. This makes a grand total of 124.5 million euros to be taken out of the professional game in 2025.
The rest of the unpaid dividends from the first two years will be clawed back in 2026 and 2027, on top of the dividends due for those years too. For a sport that runs at a loss year after year, shelling out tens of millions annually in dividends in this way risks deepening the deadly financial spiral.
Will the clubs be able to cope?
The situation is made worse by the fact that the CVC deal runs for 99 years. That means that when CVC sells its stake, the new owner keeps the same dividend rights. And if the clubs ever want to get out of this grim arrangement, there’s only one way: they will have to fork out a lot of money.
“This length [of deal] is hard to square with [France's] sports code, which says delegation and sub-delegation deals with federations and leagues must have set time limits,” the Senate report warned.
Another questionable feature concerns the fees pocketed by the main players in this financial arrangement. Of the 1.5 billion euros handed over by CVC, the Senate found that 37.5 million euros went to “pay the advisers and LFP leaders who drew up the deal”.
The two merchant banks involved “took fees totalling 24 million euros”, while LFP president Vincent Labrune pocketed a “3 million euro bonus”. LFP managing director Arnaud Rouger also received a one-off bonus of 1 million euros from the deal.
As the senators put it, this deal “raises clear concerns about a conflict of interest. While the long-term value of the CVC arrangement for the clubs remains to be seen, given the lifelong dividend to be paid, its value to the LFP’s leaders is clear, instant, and free of any future strings”. Days after the Senate report came out, France's financial crimes prosecution unit, the Parquet national financier (PNF), raided the LFP’s offices and launched a preliminary investigation.
French football's finances have been left in tatters after these sorry episodes. But there are two bits of good news for the clubs’ coffers. One is that, compared to 2019, they have pulled in far more money from sponsors, thanks to a number of new brand tie-ins, which has helped offset the drop in TV income.
Better still, gate receipts have gone up sharply since 2019, helped by record stadium attendances, something that was far from a given in view of the variable quality of play on the pitch.
Nonetheless, the sums still won’t stack up for the forthcoming 2025–2026 season. CVC’s yearly payouts have now ended, and the clubs will have to tighten their belts, and fast.
Worse still, the income from TV rights remain in the doldrums: in 2024–2025, broadcasters Dazn and BeIn handed over 500 million euros, which is less than Canal+ paid twenty years ago! And no one yet knows who will show Ligue 1 next season or how much they’ll pay. One more nasty shock could sink the weakest clubs for good.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter