Liverpool handed Jonathan David opportunity after major warning issued
| Published date | 10 December 2021 |
| Publication title | Liverpool Echo: Web Edition Articles (England) |
For the likes of Spain it was the biggest who were hit hardest, with Real Madrid and, particularly, Barcelona, being exposed for years of reckless spend and living on the very outer reaches of what they could afford. The pandemic badly exposed their financial flaws.
For leagues such as France it has been disastrous across the board, aside from the obvious exception of the Qatari-backed Paris Saint-Germain, with the collapse of the TV deal that LFP chiefs believed was going to help them close the gap on the Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A.
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That deal, with Mediapro, saw the broadcaster win the rights to cover the France's top two leagues in a bumper £800m $1.2bn per year deal. But they failed to meet payments shortly after the deal started, missing two instalments, one of £147.5m and another of £130.9m during 2020 and forcing French football to cut its ties with the firm.
Clubs suffered because they had budgeted for that extra income, and when payments defaulted the LFP needed to seek a government loan to stop clubs from disappearing over a financial cliff edge.
Deals with Amazon Prime Video and Canal+ have since been struck, albeit for far less than the original Mediapro deal, and it isn't a relationship which is particularly in sync either, with Canal+ having been unhappy at the deal that Amazon managed to achieve compared to the one that the French broadcaster had agreed earlier.
It leaves French football in a dangerous position.
On one hand the veneer of all being well across the Channel is held up by PSG and the fact that they have a forward line that consists of Lionel Messi, Neymar Jnr and Kylian Mbappe, and that their summer spending saw them acquire talent like Gianluigi Donnarumma, Sergio Ramos, Achraf Hakimi and former Liverpool man Gini Wijnaldum.
But the strength of PSG at present doesn't represent where the league and its other member clubs are. And the fears are very real that unless changes happen ahead of the 2023 auction process for TV rights then the deals won't be enough for them to keep...
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