The chaos over French TV rights should serve as a warning to the Premier League | Premier League

IThe triumphalism of the Premier league The situation is unlikely to fade away anytime soon, even during a sobering 2024. Performances in last season’s UEFA club competitions were disappointing. Although Rodri was named player of the tournament, Euro 2024 struggled to land Premier League stars. In its final, a Spanish side backed by Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao deservedly beat a team of top-flight English stars.

As a content provider, the Premier League can still boast without too much criticism. The £5bn it received for domestic rights and the £5.05bn from 2022 to 2025 for international rights dwarfs its competitors, although compared to the £7.7bn per season received by the NFL, the body run by Richard Masters still has to bow down.

The impending NBA deal, currently being intensively negotiated, will also offer far more each season than the Premier League looks down on its football peers. Those two American products have innovated on the deals that Masters and others have followed, slicing and dicing content for parties unwilling to pay a big cut. NFL Christmas Day Deal The sale of two matches, valued at $150m (£116m), opened a new door for Netflix, the world's biggest streaming service, to broadcast live sport. More are sure to follow.

In football, however, the Premier League remains a league apart. The €200m (£168m) the Bundesliga receives annually from international rights is barely a tenth of the €1.9bn of its English equivalent.

In second place is La Liga, well behind its Messi-Ronaldo years. It sold overseas rights deals in 2023 for €897m a year. A long-term US deal with ESPN through 2029, reported to be worth $1.5bn, is spread over that time. If La Liga’s last domestic deal, which runs through 2026-27, was for €5bn, it was for five years, not England’s three. Similarly, Serie A’s last domestic deal was for €4.88bn over five years. Meanwhile, in the US, the most mature overseas market, Serie A rights, sold to CBS, were, the New York Times reported, “significantly less than the previous deal signed in 2021, at around $60-70m annually.”

Is Premier League hegemony under threat? Not immediately, though the turbulence in those competing European markets may signal trouble ahead, as may the hangover from continued self-interest and financial mismanagement by elite clubs. The chaos in Ligue 1, which threatens France's top-flight clubs with Possible bankruptcy in some casesshould serve as a warning. The stability of the Premier League's partnership with BSkyB, which dates back to 1992, supported over the past decade by BT Sports and then its successor TNT, should not be taken for granted.

Executives at Ligue 1, which lost Lionel Messi, Neymar and now Kylian Mbappé, wanted more than €1bn for its TV rights but found no takers. Having previously turned down long-term partners such as Canal+, whose partnership with Ligue 1 predates Sky and the Premier League in 1984, and Qatar’s BeIn Sport, a partner since 2011, executives opted for a 2018 deal with Mediapro that the Spanish company cancelled after just six months and led to a messy bailout. The begging bowl was open again until this month as Canal+ and BeIn were unwilling to donate.

Last week, a combined deal worth around €500m was struck with Dazn (the ambitious London-based streaming service with national portfolios in Spain, Germany and Italy, whose formula for success is, according to sports media experts, to keep spending until the money comes back) and Amazon, which will broadcast one match a week for €100m a season. That was 50% of expected TV revenues. With finances already damaged by Mediapro’s misstep and COVID-19, it’s no surprise that talents like Lille’s Leny Yoro, recently signed by Manchester Unitedit is collected very easily.

Meanwhile, Ligue 1’s appeal to foreign broadcasters is shrinking exponentially. A struggling product will always be less marketable, and while Sky has been able to build a business around a Premier League core, for other companies, the numbers don’t always add up. Merger with Discovery The creation of TNT marked the company’s withdrawal from content provision and the culmination of a mission to curb Sky’s forays into broadband and phone business. Sky, owned since 2018 by US conglomerate Comcast after Rupert Murdoch shed its assets, may one day have to respond to tailwinds in corporate America as emerging technology and global events beyond sport take their toll.

What kills the goose that lays the golden eggs? Greed tops the list. The previous champions of the world’s top league – Serie A from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and La Liga in that heyday of Real Madrid and Barcelona from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s – fell into economic chaos. Is the Premier League too strong to escape that fate? Several clubs have financial and legal cases pending, with Everton, Chelsea and Manchester City topping the list. Only the naive would say that couldn’t happen here.