Canal+, BeIN Win French Champions League Soccer Rights
Canal+, BeIN Win French Champions League Soccer Rights
(Bloomberg) -- Pay-TV broadcasters Canal+ and BeIN Sports have won the French rights to Europe’s elite Champions League soccer, in a setback for current holder Altice Europe NV.
The companies paid about 375 million euros ($412 million) a season for the prestigious UEFA club tournament, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named as the matter is private.
BeIN Sports will show 104 games, while Canal+ gets the 34 matches that are likely to draw the biggest audiences, the people said. The rights cover the three seasons from 2021 to 2024.
“We are determined to make economically sensible and proportionate bids in the interests of our long-term financial security and our subscribers,” the chief executive officer of Qatar-based BeIN Media Group, Yousef Al-Obaidly, said in a statement confirming the win.
The outcome deprives Altice’s pay-TV network RMC Sport of its most prized sports rights asset. Altice won the current rights from Vivendi SA unit Canal+ and BeIN in 2017, paying 370 million euros a season for the Champions League as well as a lower-tier competition.
Altice has changed its approach to content rights after it stopped losing French subscribers to rivals, so has less need to prolong its investment in the Champions League, Francois Godard, a media analyst at Enders Analysis, said earlier this week.
Canal+ now gets to reassert itself as a major provider of premium sports in France. Its loss of French Ligue 1 soccer to Spain’s Mediapro last year shocked the industry as it had held the rights for more than three decades.
Mediapro Chairman Jaume Roures had signaled interest in the Champions League rights in October. The Spanish company aims to launch its own soccer channel in France but has yet to give more details. It suffered a setback in Italy last year, winning rights to broadcast the country’s top soccer league, then losing them after failing to provide financial guarantees.
Canal+ and BeIN did not claim rights to the other two competitions on offer -- the Europa League and a new third-tier competition.
To contact the reporters on this story: David Hellier in London at dhellier@bloomberg.net;Angelina Rascouet in London at arascouet1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rebecca Penty at rpenty@bloomberg.net, Thomas Pfeiffer
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.