Emmanuel Macron was not kind to the leaders of French football, guilty of believing in Santa Claus with Mediapro.
If the world of sport generally welcomed his meeting with Emmanuel Macron, the President of the Republic having opened the door to a resumption of sports practice from the 1er December for minors and promised an envelope of 600 million euros to help clubs and associations to cope with the crisis, the leaders of the Football League had their ears whistled. Blame it on the sale of TV rights to Mediapro.
While it had pledged to pay some 850 million euros per season, the Sino-Spanish group has not paid the € 172 million deadline for the month of October and is now demanding a discount of 25% of the amount of TV rights to be paid for this season. A situation that endangers French football, the LFP having had to contract loans to allow clubs in the championship to cope with the shortfall. And this while a legal battle has started between the two parties.
“The LFP will not be able to count on the support of the government, however. “The reasoning is still normal. People have taken largely excessive risks on bases – not of greed – but of financial reasoning a little adventurous ”, confided Jean-Michel Blanquer, Minister of National Education, Youth and Sports, adding: “You cannot go on private financial adventures and then ask the state to come to the rescue. “
It’s a crazy contract. The League had been warned.
This is also the speech given by Emmanuel Macron to the world of sport on Monday. ” We know the macroeconomic importance of this contract. I’ll tell you frankly, it’s a crazy contract. The League had been warned. We knew that this contract was fragile. I think the people who negotiated it were not very serious. We all put ourselves in an impossible situation. As always when we think that there are wonderful situations that exist ”, thus launched the Head of State in remarks reported by The Parisian.
“I think that there are enough historical actors to find an intelligent solution between the partners, but I will be demanding so that the State is not the substitute of private interests with the taxpayer’s money”, he added according to The team, taking care to add that it does “Will not let French football fall into the mistakes of what this contract had shown.”
Present at the meeting, Bernard Laporte, interviewed by BFM Business confirmed the tenor of Emmanuel Macron’s comments. “He said he would have warned by saying roughly: ‘it’s too good, it seems to be Santa Claus this proposal’, he told. He said he told them: ‘be careful, it sounds too good but be sure it exists’. Well, we realize that it does not exist for various reasons that I do not know. ”
