An audition soon to be broadcast on the LFP channel?
While Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 still do not have broadcasters for next season, Jean-Michel Aulas and three presidents of Ligue 1 (Jean-Pierre Caillot, Joseph Oughourlian and Olivier Létang) and Maarten Petermann, representative of the fund investment company which owns LOSC Merlyn Partners, were heard in the Senate this Thursday, June 20. This interview took place as part of the information mission on the financialization of football led by the Senate. Since April and until October, the committee on culture, education, communication and sport of the upper house has sought to assess the consequences of the financialization of French football.
While the president of Le Havre Jean-Michel Roussier was not very confident about the future of French football, those interviewed were complimentary towards the League and its president Vincent Labrune, who dealt with the investment fund CVC, allowing the latter to recover 13% of TV rights in exchange for more than a billion euros shared between the clubs. “HVAC was a vital operation,” explained the president of Lille Olivier Létang. The Rémois Jean-Pierre Caillot also justified the agreement with CVC, which his counterpart from Lens judges « very good » : “The procedure was launched with the unanimity of the professional clubs. [CVC] brought in a lot of money quickly, it’s not an easy task when it comes to finding financing. […] The challenge is to exist on the European scene where our French clubs regularly lose in essential events, while our French team wins. affirming at the same time that the « player trading” is the “number 1 recipe” Ligue 1 clubs.
Those interviewed also returned to the Mediapro episode, to which the LFP had sold part of the television rights to the championship only to go bankrupt: “We did not understand why Mediapro had been authorized in France, while in Italy Mediapro had been rejected due to the lack of guarantees », asked the Lille shareholder. “I think Mediapro was a mistake, but it’s easy for me to say it with hindsight », continued Joseph Ougourlian, who believes that the League has « perdue » with the Canal+ channel. « We failed, and I think that somewhere, we also need to learn from it and understand a little bit of what happened. We must regain a relationship of trust with Canal + », he added.
Senate doesn’t understand anything about it.
