PSG blaze bright while other French clubs are left in the fog

Not one to let an easy win slip through his fingers, Macron had invited Luis Enrique and his players to the Élysée Palace to receive a presidential benediction. Or perhaps it was the other way around, Macron hoping a photo of himself and his wife, Brigitte, surrounded by PSG’s victorious players and staff might allow him to borrow some of their stardust.

Throughout it all, Macron wore the bright, fixed smile of the professional politician. Whether it was sincere or not was a different matter. The French premier is, and always has been, an ardent Marseille fan. It is no political device. He is sufficiently devoted that he has been known to pepper the club’s executives with questions over the team’s prospects.

The nature of PSG’s celebrations can only have added to his inner conflict. Their dismantling of Internazionale in Munich this May was not the first time a French club has won the Champions League. Macron’s beloved Marseille did it in 1993. The revelations of domestic match-fixing that emerged in the years that followed, though, has turned that team into the invisible European champions. Outside the south of France, nobody really likes to mention it.

PSG, by contrast, were a team that all of France could look on with pride. They were the standard-bearers for Ligue 1; they had, at least according to the marketing spiel, been refashioned to reflect the bottomless talent pool of the French capital’s banlieues. (There were no Parisian players on the pitch until the 84th minute of the final; PSG started with just as many French players as Inter.)

Macron was not especially concerned with those sorts of details. “There were 11 of you on the field, but there was clearly a twelfth man: the entire French public, regardless of traditional allegiances,” Macron told the players, through teeth that were not in any way gritted. He closed his speech by declaring: “Vive la PSG, vive la France.”

Macron was simply reinforcing the message captured, not long before, at the Arc de Triomphe, where the team’s bus had been greeted by fireworks in blue, white and red. They are the colours of the club, obviously. It is just a happy coincidence that they look exactly like the French flag. This was not just a triumph for PSG, but for French football, for France as a whole.

Paris was “at the top of Europe,” Macron said. Ligue 1 could, finally, claim to be home to the best team in the world, a collection of young, thrilling players who would only improve. The future was bright. For PSG, at least. At much the same time, pretty much every other club in France was wondering if there was any sort of future at all.

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In 2018, French football’s governing body, the LFP, tasked the design agency Leroy Tremblot with creating a new brand identity for the country’s elite leagues. In their subsequent proposal, they identified youth as Ligue 1’s particular appeal. They suggested branding it the “Ligue Des Talents”, a place where fans could catch a glimpse of the game’s nascent superstars. France was a harbinger of football’s tomorrow.

Leroy Tremblot were doubtless thinking only of the action on the field. Seven years on, the idea rings no less true off it, too. PSG might return to European competition this week dreaming of dynasty, hoping that last season’s success was a beginning, rather than an end. The fate that awaits the rest of Ligue 1, though, will offer a far better guide as to what continental European football will look like – for better or for worse – in years to come.

At the heart of it is Ligue 1’s television deal; or, more accurately, its lack of one. The saga of who broadcasts France’s top flight now spans seven years, at least three separate networks or streamers, a growing pile of legal squabbles and an abundance of poor decisions. It can be traced back to the same season that the Ligue Des Talents branding was born, when the LFP’s chose to leave its traditional partner, Canal+, in favour of a lucrative arrangement with Mediapro.

That contract, combined with an international rights deal with BeIn Sports – whose chairman, Nasser al-Khelaifi, also runs PSG – was supposed to lift Ligue 1 above the other major leagues of continental Europe, if not quite to the level of the Premier League. Instead, when Mediapro only months after it started, it sent the league into a tailspin. Amazon stepped in as a broadcast partner, but did not wish to renew when the rights came up for tender in 2023. DAZN replaced the streamer on a five-year contract in 2024, but pulled out after just 12 months.

“The clubs have suffered the COVID crisis, the cancellation of the 2019/20 season, the split with MediaPro and the DAZN flop,” said Pierre Rondeau, a professor of economics at the Sports Management School in Paris. “They gave the impression of no longer attracting anyone, with no announced broadcaster following the failure of the TV rights tender. The situation is simple: it’s catastrophic.”

With little other option, the LFP this summer became the first major European league to launch its own streaming service. It is an idea that almost every other domestic tournament has discussed or even researched in recent years, including the Premier League. As a rule, they have been unwilling to tolerate the risk of spurning the life-giving money of their broadcast partners. For France, necessity – or something beyond it – being the mother of invention, there was no other choice.

The early signs are encouraging. Nicolas de Tavernost, the chief executive of LFP’s media arm, revealed after the first weekend of the season that the service had already attracted more than 600,000 subscribers, as many as DAZN had managed over the course of an entire season. “People have taken ownership of this channel,” he told L’Équipe. Philippe Bailly, a media analyst, has suggested “the platform will very quickly, and by a wide margin, surpass the target of at least one million subscribers set for its first season.”

Most of the clubs, too, have bought into the project. “They’re involved, proactive,” Rondeau said. “Previously, they sold the rights to a broadcaster and received the money, without necessarily making any effort. Now, Ligue 1+ absolutely must work for the clubs to make money. So they are obliged to participate in its development, bring in cameras, offer premium content, off-screen content, and attract consumers.”

Paris FC, the capital’s newly-promoted second club, have agreed to a season-long, behind-the-scenes documentary; another has been commissioned to follow Nice’s apparently ageless captain, Dante. LFP, too, is trying to think differently, introducing different pricing tiers and permitting two fans to share an account in order to attract a younger audience. Ligue 1 has embraced its role as a pioneer; executives from other leagues are paying attention, keen to see if this might be their future, too.

“It is an interesting innovation,” said Rondeau. “But it is a risky bet.”

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The gamble, of course, is obvious: if not enough people subscribe, the clubs do not make any money. De Tavernost has admitted that there are a couple of “difficult” years ahead as the channel builds its audience. L’Équipe has estimated that, as things stand, even this season’s champions only stand to make a guaranteed £3.5 million or so. PSG, the inevitable winner of the league, do not need that money. Everyone else does. “If Ligue 1+ fails, and fails to provide liquidity,” Rondeau said, “French clubs will be in serious financial difficulty.”

In most cases, that has been true for the last seven years, perhaps longer; and in most cases, the clubs have kept themselves afloat by making use of French football’s greatest natural resource: its players.

This summer, all but four of Ligue 1’s clubs – PSG, Chelsea’s farm team Strasbourg, newly promoted Paris FC and Marseille – turned a profit in the transfer market. That pattern has held over the last six years, ever since the collapse of the Mediapro deal. In that time, 27 teams have spent at least one season in the French top flight. According to data from Transfermarkt, all but six are in the black.

Staying alive has come at a cost. As the former Marseille chief executive Jacques-Henri Eyraud wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year, France’s decline has not only been economic, but sporting. Uefa’s co-efficient now ranks Ligue 1 closer to the domestic leagues of Portugal and the Netherlands than Serie A, La Liga or the Bundesliga. “France now looks down the European table, rather than up it,” he wrote.

Forced to sell their brightest prospects to make ends meet, French teams are less and less competitive in Europe; they are, for that matter, less and less competitive in France. PSG won the title last season with almost two months to spare. They have failed to win the league just twice since 2012. It is no surprise Ligue 1 has struggled to find a broadcast partner, or even to win an audience: for years, it has hardly provided a compelling spectacle.

That phenomenon is not unique to France: it is mirrored not just in many of Europe’s smaller markets but in Germany and Spain, too, although the latter does have a pool of two potential champions. It is in Ligue 1, though, that it has become most pronounced.

Should the streaming experiment fail, the bet the clubs have been forced to make will prove a losing one, the vicious cycle would accelerate, the chasm between PSG and their peers growing ever wider. The team hailed in the Élysée Palace as the standard-bearers for French football towering over a wasteland, a stark warning to the rest of Europe where the future lies.

Photo credit: Thibaud Moritz/AFP