On the occasion of the winter break, Vincent Labrune gave a long interview to our colleagues at Parisian. The president of the Professional Football League (LFP) notably returned to the more or less laborious beginnings of DAZN.
DAZN too expensive, a secondary problem
While he recognizes that DAZN “perhaps made a mistake by hitting the prices a little hard at the start,” Vincent Labrune also wishes “at all costs” the success of the British platform. According to the former president of OM, the problem of disaffection around Ligue 1 does not come from the product itself or its method of distribution.
« DAZN is an exceptional international player and has achieved the feat of launching a product in less than two weeks without bugs or black screens. We are fully behind them. I wouldn’t give you a number (of number of DAZN subscribers). I can only tell you that they did not live up to their predictionsconcedes Vincent Labrune. But it is linked to a major effect, the explosion of piracy. Out of three people who watch Ligue 1, only one pays at the moment. It’s extremely serious. It is the most pirated product in France. We need radical decisions “. And definitely don’t tell him that the piracy is the result of a subscription price that is too high or of instability regarding the identity of the main broadcaster since 2020.
And while the TV rights market is reaching saturation, Vincent Labrune continues to believe in an upward trend: “ We cannot compare Italy, Spain, Germany, England which have a strong football culture with France. To summarize, we discovered football in 1998. But I believe that there is a fair price which probably seems to me to be a little higher than what we have today. All our revenue centers are growing strongly, except domestic TV rights. »
Worse still, the trend is downward and it is not clear that this will change during the next call for tenders, which could well be brought forward if DAZN decides to trigger its exit clause after two years… due to lack of a sufficient number of subscribers.
Photo credits: Sylvain Thomas/FEP/Icon Sport
