And if the world of the ball round in france was the big loser on the football scene, the outbreak of coronavirus ? The only major championship of football to be stopped in the face of the pandemic, France is faced with a paradox. If its european competitors to return to the stall, financial and sports will watch the Championship of France. But if these championships foreigners are quitting their season, and sell France football talents ?
While the German clubs have received on Wednesday the green light for the government for returning to competition in may, with the proceeds from rights tv that go with them, the professional football League (LFP) has finalized the fiscal year 2019-2020 last Thursday. And the clubs now think of ways to survive four or five months without income. "The Germans will recover their rights tv, Spain, Italy and the other (also) for us, we will build more time on the part-time unemployment. We do not prepare to be competitive at the european level ", expressed concern at the president lyonnais Jean-Michel Aulas with the Agence France-Press and journal The Progress.
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1.7 billion euros in revenue in 2018
The League 1 is already behind its competitors in the top 5 european : according to a report by UEFA released in the beginning of the year, the French clubs have generated 1.7 billion euros in revenue in 2018, less than Italy ($2.3 billion), Spain ($3.1 billion), Germany ($3.2 billion) and England (5.4 billion). The gap risk does it grow ? As soon as the words of the French Prime minister, Édouard Philippe, according to which "the season will not return" due to the coronavirus, the 28th of April, some of the players of football were excited to note the implications of such a decision.
" I hope that France concerted with its european neighbours before making this decision, because if this is not the case, it is serious. This means that it is killing its economy of football, while its competitors continue to be able to access it ", had risen a club president. The leaders had then been reassured by the ministry of Sports, the latter ensuring have implemented a "cycle of trade" with its european counterparts. And the maintenance of support to the sector (part-time workers, loans guaranteed by the State...) had also swept away some fears.
"A steepening of the economic risk"
But since then, some neighbors have said their return to the land. So much so that even the executive director general of the LFP, Didier Quillot, slipped on BFM TV that " it would certainly be a difficulty for clubs when France was the only (among major championships) to have taken this decision." One of the concerns major clubs : a decrease in the value of the players in the French market, by far the largest exporter to the european players abroad by 2019, according to the Observatory of the football of the international Centre for the study of sport (CIES) of Neuchâtel. In a study published Wednesday, the firm of KPMG has estimated that the financial value of the workforce of Ligue 1 clubs would fall by 27.1 per cent if the season did not resume nowhere (KPMG does not consider a scenario where only some of the championships would stop permanently).
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"there could be a steepening of the economic risk, because the French players will be less highlighted compared to the players of foreign countries," reports from the Agence France-Presse Pierre Ferracci, president of Paris FC. A hard blow to the "League of talent" and its clubs fond of the "trading players" (Lyon, Lille, Monaco) ? Not so sure, according to Bernard Caïazzo (Saint-Etienne), president of the union premier League comprising the majority of the stables of the elite.
"It should not be wrecked"
"When you're the largest manufacturer of cement in Europe, you can't expect that your overseas customers are at the stop !" métaphorise the leader. "The real disaster, it would be that championships, buyers the major did not go to the end. The English market, this is a issue extremely safe. To ensure that our economy in the football hold, it needs around it to championships strong. "
"the resumption of The championships may have two contradictory effects : a positive effect, because it allows a maintaining of the financial resources of clubs to foreigners, and a negative effect, because it will shine a light on other players," assesses Bastien Drut, the author of the Mercato : the economics of football in the Twenty-first century. "It is not necessary to be wrecked, even if the small French clubs rely heavily on transfers for budgetary balance and will not showcase the usual," concludes the economist of football.
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