Amazon has secured the broadcast rights to 80% of Ligue 1 games in France until 2024 in a landmark deal worth around €250m per season. Mediapro originally agreed to pay €784m per season for the same package for the four seasons 2020-2024, but due to the financial pressures caused by the coronavirus pandemic the deal collapsed, and as a result the value of the rights package declined by 68%. News of Amazon’s deal came just days before the conclusion of its broadcast of the French Open tennis tournament, Amazon’s only other major sports property in the country.

Amazon has subsequently announced that it will charge Prime subscribers an additional €12.99 per month if they want to watch Ligue 1 (and it will not be possible to subscribe to the Ligue 1 offering without first becoming a Prime Subscriber). According to Ampere’s Q1 2021 consumer survey, 10% of current Amazon Prime Video subscribers in France would be willing to pay for Ligue 1, or around 450k. Should all of these upgrade to Ligue 1 access, Amazon would expect to generate an additional €55m per year. 

Therefore, in order to break even on the full annual cost of the rights (€250m), Amazon would need to attract 1.2m new subscribers to its Prime plus Ligue 1 offering. To put that in context, during Mediapro’s period as primary Ligue 1 rights holder, its Téléfoot channel managed to attract only 600k subscribers (around 17% of the company’s target) but was priced higher at €25.90 per month and did not have an established subscriber base as Amazon does, with 4.5m Prime Video subscribers at the end of Q2 2021.

The success of Amazon in the tender does leave several questions concerning Canal+, which in 2020, obtained the rights to 20% of the Ligue 1 matches until 2024 through a sub-licensing deal with beIN. Those rights were valued at €332m per season before the collapse of Mediapro’s deal. Since then, Canal+ has demanded that the rights owners, the Ligue de Football Professionel (LFP) re-tender those rights, to reflect their decrease in value in the context of the pandemic. The LFP, however, has so far rejected Canal+’s demands.

This leaves the French operator with a higher rights bill than Amazon and only two Ligue 1 games per round to Amazon’s eight. Were all the broadcast rights to be devalued to the same degree as the re-tendered rights, the package Canal+ holds would be worth close to €100m per season, while the value of the Ligue 2 rights that BeIN Sports holds would be reduced from €30m to around €10m

Note: This is an updated version of an Insight originally posted on June 24 2021, reflecting new detail on Amazon’s pricing strategy