The French Professional Football League (LFP) has announced a renewed appetite for its domestic media rights from traditional broadcasters and streaming platforms, raising hopes that the top division of French soccer can secure a stable commercial partner ahead of the 2027/28 campaign. For a competition that has spent recent years navigating a turbulent landscape of failed broadcast agreements, depressed rights values, and a shrinking pool of interested networks, the shift signals a potential turning point for French club football.
Ligue 1 has operated without a senior traditional broadcaster since 2025, caught
in the fallout of a series of ill-fated media deals that progressively exhausted the market’s willingness to invest heavily in the product. When the league found itself unable to secure a satisfactory commercial offer for its primary package of matches, leadership took the unprecedented step of launching its own direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming service. That platform, branded as Ligue 1+, debuted last season and now broadcasts all ten matches from each Ligue 1 weekend directly to consumers, eventually drawing around a million subscribers.
Yet, despite the relative stability and direct revenue generation provided by the DTC platform, the LFP remains eager to return to a more conventional rights arrangement. Club executives view a traditional broadcast partnership as essential for providing long-term financial certainty following a period of profound operational upheaval. To spearhead this effort, the league appointed Olivier Bramly as the new chief executive of LFP Media. Over the past several months, Bramly has engaged in extensive dialogues with traditional broadcasters and streaming services across the market to carefully gauge demand, mend fractured relationships, and test the waters for a future tender.
Initially, the league’s strategic roadmap pointed toward issuing a tender for a subsequent broadcast cycle that would kick off ahead of the 2029/30 season. However, conversations led by Bramly encouraged the organization to accelerate its timeline, driven by what he described as notably improved market conditions and clear eagerness from prospective partners. Before his arrival, the prevailing assumption inside the league offices was that the tender would cover the 2029 to 2034 period. However, feedback from the market indicated that target was simply too far into the future for major players to commit strategically. Streamers and pay-TV platforms alike expressed a much more immediate and clear interest in bidding for a cycle spanning between 2027 and 2032, prompting the league to bring the process forward.
Regulatory shifts within France have also played a crucial role in reshaping the LFP’s commercial strategy. Recent changes to domestic broadcasting regulations now permit the league to offer all of its matches as a single, comprehensive bundle rather than forcing them to split the inventory across two separate packages. The LFP is betting heavily that this consolidation will serve as a powerful incentive for bidders who demand total exclusivity over the championship, eliminating the fragmented viewing experience that has occasionally frustrated fans in the past.
The newly structured tender invites interested parties to submit bids either for the broad broadcast rights covering all matches across traditional and digital channels or, alternatively, for the exclusive distribution rights to operate the existing Ligue 1+ service. Should a successful bidder step forward and opt for the comprehensive broadcast package, the current standalone Ligue 1+ service would subsequently be wound down.
Addressing the financial expectations of the upcoming auction, Bramly noted that the LFP has established an ambitious yet realistic reserve price point designed to represent an attractive proposition for the eventual winner. While he acknowledged that the league would naturally prefer higher valuations given historical highs, the current price point is deliberately set to act as a foundational bargain that can stimulate sustainable future growth. Although the exact financial figures of the reserve price remain confidential, Bramly characterized the opportunity as a once-in-a-lifetime occasion to acquire the domestic rights to a major football league in a top European market at an unusually affordable entry price.
This pragmatic approach is deeply informed by the bruising history of Ligue 1’s recent broadcast agreements. The structural challenges began when Mediapro vastly overpaid in 2018, successfully securing the lion’s share of the domestic rights with a staggering bid worth €814 million per year. That venture, built around the short-lived Telefoot channel, required an ambitious base of 3.5 million subscribers to break even and collapsed after just a few months of operation. In the wake of that financial disaster, Amazon Prime stepped in with a heavily discounted rescue deal before the league subsequently brokered agreements worth €500 million annually with DAZN and BeIN Sports in 2024. However, when DAZN later opted to terminate its contract early, Ligue 1 found itself momentarily depleted of viable conventional options, ultimately forcing the creation of its own streaming channel.
Should the LFP fail to receive any satisfactory external offers during the current tender process, the organization is fully prepared to continue operating Ligue 1+, with the ongoing objective of steadily growing its subscriber base. Although the platform has been successfully marketed as an accessible, affordable subscription available across a multitude of technical devices, the ultimate ceiling for a direct-to-consumer league-run channel remains a subject of ongoing industry debate.
While the LFP has chosen to pause public reporting of exact subscriber numbers, Bramly highlighted that the service successfully increased its average revenue per user by €5 after incorporating an additional match per weekend that was previously broadcast by BeIN Sports. Securing carriage on Canal+, France’s dominant pay-TV platform, remains an obvious and potent avenue for dramatically expanding the reach of the competition. Ligue 1+ has remained entirely absent from Canal+ since its inception, and the legacy broadcaster notably declined to submit a bid during the previous auction cycle amid a severe deterioration in its relationship with the league, effectively severing an association that had run continuously since 1984.
While expanding content offerings on the league’s platform remains an option, leadership is acutely conscious of past missteps, remaining deeply wary of repeating public relations miscalculations, such as the premature claims made regarding rights to the 2026 FIFA World Cup early last year. Moving forward, the league views its in-house platform as both an operational alternative and a strategic insurance policy. Describing the digital service as an amazing strategic asset, Bramly emphasized that any external bid from a traditional partner must deliver substantially more value than the current independent trajectory of Ligue 1+. Regardless of external market outcomes, he stressed that Ligue 1+ serves as the ultimate financial safety net for the organization, confirming that the league intends to continue developing the platform over the next five years on a non-exclusive basis with a clear strategic vision, reinforcing that the decision to open a tender now stems from genuine market demand rather than any perceived failure of the digital initiative.
