PSG President Al-Khelaifi divides French football as he tries to save it

By David Hellier and Rodrigo Orihuela

An 11th-hour broadcasting deal to safeguard the finances of France’s elite football clubs is casting Nasser Al-Khelaifi, one of the sport’s most influential figures, as both hero and villain.

On a phone call in early July, Al-Khelaifi, president of reigning champions Paris Saint-Germain FC, persuaded the Ukrainian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik to increase an offer to show French Ligue 1 games on his sports streaming platform Dazn Group Ltd.

The top competition is set to start in mid-August, when France will return to one of its biggest sporting passions after the Olympic Games in Paris. Without a broadcasting deal, no games would be shown in a country that’s produced some of the best footballing talent in recent decades, and some smaller clubs could have faced bankruptcy without the much-needed revenue. 

Prior to Al-Khelaifi’s call, Blavatnik’s negotiations with Ligue de Football Professionnel, the body overseeing professional football in France, had ground to a halt. Dazn had little competition, so Blavatnik and his team had no incentive to raise their offer. 

Shortly after Al-Khelaifi’s intervention, Dazn agreed to a roughly €400 million ($432 million)-a-year deal for Ligue 1’s domestic rights. BeIN, a Qatari broadcaster chaired by Al-Khelaifi, is adding another €100 million a year for certain Ligue 1 rights to a package that brings relief for the LFP after a checkered recent history in striking media deals.

But the pact has exposed a rift between Ligue 1 owners who see Al-Khelaifi as a driving force for the fortunes of French football and some who question his methods. Bloomberg News spoke with eight people familiar with the Dazn and beIN discussions. They described a series of tense exchanges over Al-Khelaifi’s dual roles with PSG and beIN, as well as his stance on a potentially bold, new alternative to the traditional broadcast model.

“It is wholly inappropriate for a party, while making a proposal that creates a conflict of interest, to remain on a governance call during deliberations,” Olympique Lyonnais owner John Textor said in reference to a video call meeting that took place on Bastille Day. “Universally accepted principles of good governance require a recusal.”

Three other people involved in the discussions, who asked not to be identified as the talks were private, pointed to concerns about potential conflicts for Al-Khelaifi.

A spokesperson for Al-Khelaifi said the PSG owner has an external law firm review the meetings he takes part in to avoid the risk of conflicts arising. Al-Khelaifi, who is used to being in meetings about broadcast rights, recused himself from LFP board votes to ratify the Dazn and beIN deals in late July.

“As a member of the LFP board, Nasser Al-Khelaifi contributes to all major discussions on the future of the league, and has spent the past six months passionately fighting for the collective interests of French clubs of all sizes — particularly the small clubs who are most financially at risk,” the spokesperson said.

Al-Khelaifi’s presence in the Dazn-beIN negotiations contributed to what some club representatives saw as poor governance, the people said. By contrast, Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger will recuse himself from any future broadcast negotiations between Disney’s streaming platform ESPN and Angel City FC, the US women’s football team he’s just agreed to buy with his wife. 

“The negotiations were intense because we wanted to reach agreements that meet the interests of all the clubs and which will allow French football to continue its development and increase its attractiveness,” LFP president Vincent Labrune said in an Aug. 1 statement announcing the deals with Dazn and beIN. A representative for LFP didn’t respond to requests for additional comment.

A spokesperson for Blavatnik said the Dazn owner is looking forward to growing football in France but declined to comment further. A representative for Dazn declined to comment.

Al-Khelaifi’s influence in football stretches back more than a decade, to when Qatar Sports Investments acquired a majority stake in PSG. Today, the 50-year-old also serves as chairman of the European Club Association, a body representing more than 650 professional football teams. In 2021, he was among the most vocal critics of the doomed Super League project to transform European football.

The Qataris spent heavily to attract superstar players — including Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Neymar — to PSG to bring the team success and boost the appeal of French football globally. 

Still, Ligue 1 ranks as the smallest of Europe’s “Big Five” leagues by revenue, according to Deloitte’s latest survey of football finances. It generated just €706 million from broadcasting during the 2022/23 season, compared with figures of €1.5 billion to €3.7 billion in the four other major leagues. Aggregate operating losses of Ligue 1 clubs were the highest in the Big Five by a “significant margin,” Deloitte found, as matchday and commercial revenue saw muted growth. 

Some Ligue 1 owners believe Al-Khelaifi has played an important role in trying to improve the financial situation in French football. Maarten Petermann, who runs the investment firm that owns Lille, praised the PSG president for helping to secure the latest broadcast deal. “Nasser and Labrune saved the day,” Petermann told Bloomberg.

Juan Sartori, vice president at AS Monaco, said negotiations with Dazn were in a “bad place” before Al-Khelaifi was asked to step in. “He came away with a financial guarantee and a bigger offer,” Sartori said. “Nasser and PSG have been the biggest supporters of the French league over the past 10 years.”

LFP’s recent history of negotiating broadcast deals has been complicated. 

In 2020, a roughly €800 million-a-year contract with the Spanish broadcaster Mediapro was pulled, leaving the LFP scrambling to plug the financial gap. A cut-price deal was struck with Amazon.com Inc. in 2021 and the following year, the LFP agreed to sell a minority stake in Ligue 1’s media rights business to CVC Capital Partners Plc. The private equity firm installed Ben Morel as CEO of LFP’s commercial entity to help negotiate with broadcasters and find new ways of cashing in on televised games.

As the Dazn deal hung in the balance, Ligue 1 clubs and CVC had been exploring alternatives, including the creation of a new subscription-based channel they believed could grow to become a more lucrative option for French clubs in the longer term, Bloomberg News reported.

The plan was ambitious. Any new channel wouldn’t have delivered the advance payments attached to traditional broadcasting deals. CVC had been working with banks to arrange loans to make up any financial shortfalls for clubs should they decide to reject the Dazn-beIN offer and proceed with the alternative. 

Morel, who previously helped overhaul the commercial and media operations of another of CVC’s sporting investments, Six Nations Rugby, was a proponent. Textor, meanwhile, was among those who liked the idea of an alternative to the Dazn-beIN deal but wanted more time to figure out what that platform might look like. In a post on his LinkedIn page in July, Joseph Oughourlian, the president of Racing Club de Lens, wrote that Ligue 1 should have seized the opportunity to manage its own TV offer.

Al-Khelaifi, while not entirely opposed to a new channel, saw attempts to create one in such a short space of time as a financially reckless pursuit. 

“As any media rights expert will tell you, the sudden launch of a direct-to-consumer channel without any minimum revenue guarantees and within a time frame of three weeks would be absolutely catastrophic financially and operationally,” the spokesperson for Al-Khelaifi and beIN said.

During the Bastille Day call, both Morel and Textor drew rebukes from Al-Khelaifi, according to people familiar with the discussions. Al-Khelaifi questioned Textor’s footballing know-how and said the Lyon owner wasn’t thinking enough about other clubs in the French ecosystem, the people said.

While Textor is a relative newcomer to football, he’s done a lot in a short time. The former technology and media entrepreneur has built one of the world’s largest mutliclub stables, housing teams from England to Brazil, though achievements on the pitch have been mixed. Textor said it is inappropriate when a “party acts to intimidate deliberations and harshly criticizes those that prefer alternative proposals.”

Morel and a representative for CVC declined to comment.

Revenue split

One of the reasons that more work hadn’t been done to establish the foundations of a new channel was because Ligue 1 owners anticipated a broadcast deal worth €700 million-a-year or more involving beIN, and therefore saw their alternative plan as something for the future, people familiar with the matter said.

“This was a very tense meeting with strong emotions on either side,” said Monaco’s Sartori. “It makes sense to think of a league channel one day but right now it is just hopeful thinking.”

Under terms of the deals now in place, Dazn will pay about €2 billion over five years, with beIN contributing another €500 million during the period for the right to broadcast a showpiece Ligue 1 match, such as those involving PSG, each week. 

Revenue splits in football broadcast deals have historically rewarded bigger, better-known clubs capable of drawing the largest TV audiences and France is no different. PSG will take a larger share of the Dazn-beIN payouts. Smaller clubs will have to make do with less, even before the deductions for CVC, taxes and league expenses that all teams are subject to.

In his LinkedIn post, RC Lens’s Oughourlian wrote that the Dazn-beIN deal will equate to roughly €9 million a year for his club. “Never have L1 clubs received so little in terms of TV rights,” he wrote. Oughourlian ultimately supports the LFP’s decision to proceed with the broadcast deal, people familiar with the matter said.

In the end, LFP said the majority of France’s top clubs were in favor of the new broadcasting package and the footballing body has called for “calm” to help ensure the agreement is a success for all parties. There’s no guarantee things will hold together for the full five-year cycle. Dazn and LFP have an option to break things off after two years and Lyon’s Textor has hinted at lingering discontent in some quarters. 

“Others may have chosen to avoid the confrontation that was so evident on the call,” Textor said.