Ligue 1, the top football league in France, could be mulling over regular-season matches in the US, according to Front Office Sports. The league receives an annual $85 million for the foreign broadcast rights of its matches, but that contract (with BeIN Sports) is coming to an end. The league now hopes to triple the value of those rights. BeIN does not, in fact, have wide distribution in the US, as Sports Business Journal reports. In August, it was available to 9.5 million households – and ESPN to 71 million.
Ben Morel, CEO of LFP Media, which sells Ligue 1’s rights, has told the Journal the following: “We are going to be working with our future broadcast partner very closely in terms of bringing meaningful games to the US. I’ve had a lot of history in my previous jobs of doing a lot of international games, and I know that what is important is the meaningfulness of them. They can’t just be exhibition games. They have to be games that matter. We want to do this as a long-term play, not just as one-off, nice little exhibitions.” Moreover, LFP Media has hired Octagon to negotiate media rights and rEvolution to run marketing in the US.
The NFL and the NBA have seen their broadcast rights increase in value, but mid-size leagues have not. To compete, Ligue 1 is, as the Journal puts it, getting “much more creative than traditional European leagues that sell their rights into this market.” Ligue 1 would handle production, and LFP, said Morel, will focus on how the matches, teams and players are presented. One option is to provide what Morel called more access, and one example of this would be a documentary now in production about the league’s trading deadline.
As Front Office Sports has reported, Spain’s equivalent of Ligue 1, La Liga, has sought to set a regular-season match in the US but gotten itself tangled in a lawsuit, while the UEFA is open to setting Champions League matches there and some organizers of the 2026 World Cup have suggested the English Premier League do the same.
