The French Professional Football League (LFP) has announced a renewed appetite for its domestic media rights from traditional broadcasters, setting its sights on securing a new partner ahead of the 2027/28 campaign as it looks to move past a turbulent period of broadcast instability.
Ligue 1, the top tier of French professional soccer, has been operating without a traditional senior broadcast partner since 2025. This vacuum was created after a succession of ill-fated broadcast agreements significantly reduced the overall commercial value of the league’s media rights and ultimately exhausted the potential pool of traditional broadcasters willing to take on the financial commitment required.
Faced with the challenge of failing to secure a satisfactory commercial offer for its main package of live matches, the league took the bold step of launching its own direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming platform last season. That proprietary platform has since evolved to air all ten matches from every Ligue 1 weekend, successfully attracting around a million subscribers and giving the league a vital operational safety net during a period of acute market uncertainty.
Despite the relative resilience shown by the DTC initiative, the LFP remains firmly intent on returning to a more conventional rights arrangement. League leadership believes that a traditional broadcast partnership will provide much-needed financial certainty and long-term stability for French clubs following a prolonged phase of significant industry upheaval. Olivier Bramly, the newly appointed chief executive of LFP Media, has spent several months actively engaging with traditional broadcasters and major streaming services. His primary objectives have been to accurately gauge current market demand, understand shifting corporate appetites, and repair relationships that had frayed during previous rights cycles.
Initially, the league had hoped to issue a formal tender for a brand-new broadcast cycle that would kick off ahead of the 2029/30 season. However, Bramly revealed in an interview with SportsPro that his extensive consultations with the market had encouraged the LFP to bring the timeline forward, pointing directly to a noticeable improvement in overall market conditions and clear enthusiasm from prospective partners.
Before his arrival, the prevailing strategy within the organization was to issue a tender for the five-year period covering 2029 to 2034. However, the immediate reaction from the market was that a timeline extending that far into the future was simply too far away for planning purposes. Streamers and pay-TV platforms alike expressed a clear and immediate interest in bidding for a much sooner window, specifically targeting the period between 2027 and 2032.
Crucially, recent changes to French regulatory frameworks mean that the LFP is now legally permitted to offer all of its matches as a single, comprehensive bundle, rather than being forced to fracture the inventory into two separate packages as had been required in past auctions. The league is optimistic that this regulatory flexibility will serve as a powerful incentive to attract major bidders who explicitly demand total commercial and editorial exclusivity.
The upcoming tender will formally invite bids for either the broad broadcast rights covering all matches across the board or, alternatively, the exclusive distribution rights specifically for the existing Ligue 1+ service. In a scenario where the successful commercial bidder opts for the former comprehensive broadcast rights package, the existing Ligue 1+ direct-to-consumer service would be officially shut down.
Bramly noted that the LFP has established what he described as an ambitious yet realistic reserve price point. He characterized this financial figure as a genuine bargain for whichever entity ultimately wins the tender. While he acknowledged that being in this pricing position is not precisely where the league ideally wanted to end up, he emphasized that it will serve as a solid commercial foundation for future growth. Although the exact financial figure of the reserve price remains undisclosed, Bramly maintained that acquiring the domestic rights to a major football league in a powerhouse European market like France at such an affordable price represents a once-in-a-lifetime commercial opportunity.
The modern history of Ligue 1’s domestic media rights has been defined by extreme financial volatility and high-profile miscalculations. Back in 2018, the international agency Mediapro vastly overpaid when it successfully secured the lion’s share of Ligue 1’s domestic broadcast rights with a staggering bid worth €814 million, or approximately US$912 million, per year. Its dedicated Telefoot channel, which required a massive subscriber base of 3.5 million paying households to break even and achieve commercial viability, collapsed and shut down after just a few months of operation.
In the wake of that monumental collapse, Amazon Prime stepped in with a severely cut-price deal before the league subsequently brokered agreements valued at €500 million, or roughly US$560 million, per year with DAZN and BeIN Sports in 2024. However, when DAZN opted to terminate its costly contract early, Ligue 1 found itself once again exposed and effectively running out of viable commercial options.
Should the LFP ultimately fail to receive any satisfactory external offers through the upcoming tender process, the league is fully prepared to continue operating Ligue 1+ independently, with a clear focus on organically growing its subscriber base. While Ligue 1+ has been successfully pitched to consumers as an accessible and affordable subscription product available across a multitude of digital platforms, leadership acknowledges that it remains unclear exactly where the ultimate subscriber ceiling lies for the standalone service.
Bramly shared that while the league has stopped publicly disclosing exact subscriber numbers, it has successfully managed to increase its average revenue per user (ARPU) by €5, equivalent to roughly US$5.60, after incorporating an additional match per weekend that was previously broadcast exclusively by BeIN Sports.
Securing carriage on Canal+, traditionally the nation’s largest and most influential pay-TV platform, would represent the most obvious and impactful pathway to significantly increasing the service’s consumer reach and market penetration. Ligue 1+ has remained entirely absent from Canal+ since its launch. Furthermore, the pay-TV giant notably chose not to submit a bid for Ligue 1 rights during the previous auction cycle due to a severely deteriorating corporate relationship with the league, bringing an abrupt end to a historic broadcasting association that dated back continuously to 1984.
While exploring traditional partnerships, the LFP could also seek to add complementary content to its proprietary service, though leadership will undoubtedly remain acutely cautious to avoid the embarrassment of prematurely claiming rights victories, mirroring the public missteps surrounding the 2026 FIFA World Cup early last year.
Describing the strategic value of the league’s digital venture, Bramly emphasized that Ligue 1+ remains an amazing strategic asset for the organization, noting that any future external bid will need to deliver commercial returns that far surpass the current upward trajectory of Ligue 1+. He reiterated that whatever happens in the broader market, the ultimate life insurance policy for the league is the continued existence and development of Ligue 1+. The organization intends to continue developing the platform over the next five years on a non-exclusive basis, supported by clear ideas on how to expand its footprint, reinforcing that the decision to bypass a traditional tender earlier was rooted in a pragmatic assessment of what works.
