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EFE
The economic model of French football “is dead” after its professional clubs lost 250 million euros last season and the situation is not going to improve, the person responsible for financial control of the league warned L’Équipe this Friday.
“The situation continues to be complicated” as of June 30 – the end of last season – since the clubs accumulated that net loss of 250 million despite the fact that they made “very good” sales of 830 million, he noted. Jean-Paul Mickeler, head of the National Directorate of Control and Management (DNCG), the economic gendarme of the French league.
In an interview published online on Friday night, Mickeler stated that the first division clubs lost 150 million last season compared to the second division’s 100, and warns that the situation is going to get worse, since the professional clubs received 550 million euros last season from the agreement with the US investment fund CVC, but this season the amount they will receive for that concept will fall to 136 million.
Television rights are also going to drop a lot, due to the lower interest in the French league among the networks. The head of the DNCG stressed that in recent years the French clubs “they have not worked” on reducing their wage bill.
Among the clubs monitored by UEFA throughout Europe, the wage bill represents an average of 53% of their income, but in France that figure shoots up to 67%. he added. “When you add to this that domestic (television) rights are less high than in other countries, and a lower capacity to generate complementary income, it is understood that we are facing the end of a model,” he concluded.
Mickeler recalled that this problem is not exclusively French, since there are clubs with losses in England, Italy or Spain, but he insists that “the absolute priority for our clubs between now and May is to lighten their salary masses.”
“The economic model, as it existed, is dead,” sentence, and gives as an example the success of the modest Brest, who is having unexpected success in the UEFA Champions League: “Money is not everything.”
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The French Professional Football League (LFP) decided last week, after a report from the DNGC, provisionally relegate historic Lyon to the second division if he does not significantly reduce his salary bill before the end of the season.
Mickeler explained that the DNGC understands that the firm that owns Lyon, the American Eagle Grouphas a financial recovery plan, but as long as the planned actions are not carried out (sale of the English Crystal Palace, the group’s listing in New York and transfers of players) the organization’s obligation “is to be skeptical.”
“The DNGC only wants one thing: that John Textor (owner of the club) complete these important operations and that we can annul this relegation in our next hearing,” he stressed.
