Football: Senate votes for creation of a company responsible for selling television rights

Requested by the Professional Football League, it must bring up clubs, struggled by the media-cheap failure and the sanitary crisis.

Le Monde with AFP

The project was expected by French football. The Senate voted, Wednesday, January 19, a proposal for a law the Republic on the market (LRM) on the sport which provides for the creation of a trading company to better sell television rights.

“There is urgency, you have to call a cat a cat,” pleaded the rapporteur, Michel Savin (Republicans, LR), emphasizing the urgency to give French football a new opportunity to release from fresh money and value TV rights abroad.

According to the Professional Football League (LFP), which has been calling for months the creation of such a company, the French clubs accuse between 600 and 800 million euros of losses.

Financially led by the failure of the old holder of the Mediapro TVs and the health crisis, French football has already begun to select potential shareholders for this future company, which would be backed by an investment fund. “We debate for not much because the tour de table is already in progress,” redeemed Senator Ecologist Thomas Dossus.

Arrival by amendment to the National Assembly End of March 2021, this company, which would be a subsidiary of the FPA, was welcomed with prudence by senators in committee last week. They reviewed their copy in session Wednesday night: they finally set 15%, compared to 10% in committee, the share of an external private investor. But this remains below 20% voted by the Assembly and wanted by the Government, which considers that below, this will not be attractive.

By yielding up to 20% of the capital, the FPA could hope to rise between 1.8 and 2.5 billion euros, according to the valuation figures of the company, between 9 and 12.5 billion of euros.

Make “returning a little fresh money”

The time press, warned the President of the FPA, Vincent Labrune, during a hearing in the Senate in early December 2021: “If, in the short term, we are not able to return a little fresh money In the crates to save us and bounce, the championship of France will become the Slovenia Championship. “

The Senate also retoted a vette right of the French Football Federation (FFF) in the future entity, whose PLA did not want. The FFF will have “an advisory voice”. In addition, the statutes of this future company will have to be endorsed by the FFF and the Ministry of Sports.

The contours of this new company can still move because to be adopted before the end of the five-year, deputies and senators will have to agree on February 16 on this text in Joint Joint Committee (CMP).

On this occasion, the Minister of Sports, Roxana Maracineanu, hopes to return to the version voted by the Assembly about the full parity in the federations, the mechanism whose Senate has slowed down the schedule of establishment. “The world of sport is an old system, pretty conservative, it’s a question of democracy, renewal,” pleaded Roxana Maracineanu Tuesday night.

A fixed fine against the violence in the stages

The Senate voted a government amendment on the delicate lump sum announced in the range of measures against violence in stages after a black series since the end of the summer of 2021.

“The introduction, the holding or use of rockets or artifices of any kind (fumigent) or the introduction, without legitimate motive, of objects likely to constitute a weapon in a sports enclosure” may be punished. ‘a fixed fine “in the amount of 800 euros” instead of the three years in prison and 15,000 euros of current fine.

Senators also voted the possibility for the President of the National Games Authority (ANJ), under the control of the administrative judge, to intervene to block illegal sports betting sites, more efficiency, at Place of a judicial block, which takes “four to six months”.

Promised at the beginning of the five-year as a great sport law to encourage sports practice, the ambition of this text has been revised downward, as noted by all parliamentarians, both in the Assembly, in March. 2021, that in the Senate. The text was voted by 227 votes for, 0 against and 115 abstentions.

/Media reports.