Canal Plus loses football rights to Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera has been awarded the majority of media rights to screen Uefa Champions League matches in France for three years from 2012 in a deal worth €180m, landing a serious blow on French pay-TV operator Canal Plus.

The financial details of the deal were undisclosed, but a person close to the talks said the Qatari broadcaster had offered twice as much as the amount Canal Plus was paying for the four packages, which include the rights to televise 133 matches per season. Al Jazeera will pay about €60m each year, compared with the €31m a year paid currently by Canal Plus for the games.

The move highlights an aggressive push into the French football market by Al Jazeera, which also trumped Canal Plus recently by agreeing to pay €90m a year for the rights to screen many of France’s top domestic football matches from next year.

Earlier this year, a Qatari fund linked to the Gulf state’s royal family also took a 70 per cent stake in Paris St-Germain, a Ligue 1 club. Qatar is boosting its position in world football after the surprise decision by Fifa, football’s world governing body, to award it the 2022 World Cup.

The person close to the rights talks said: “Al Jazeera still doesn’t seem to have a clear business model [for football coverage in France] and we are waiting to see what their offering will be as they haven’t yet set up their channel, but they are willing to pay whatever it takes.”

Conor O’Shea, a media analyst at Kepler, said the loss of the rights was “definitely an issue” for Canal Plus.

“[It] has a more balanced premium offering with lots of films, but if they lose sport it’s a bit of a problem – someone purchasing a Canal Plus package mainly for the sport may be tempted to leave,” he said.

Canal Plus acknowledged that the loss of the deal to Al Jazeera was a blow, but insisted that the broadcaster was more than “just a movie and football channel”.

The company is putting significant investment into original programming, traditionally a weak spot in French television. The French broadcaster is also still in the running for the remaining Champions League package, which includes the most prestigious 13 games, including the final, though this has traditionally been awarded to TF1, a French free-to-air broadcaster.

David Roberts, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute, based in Doha, capital of Qatar, said the state-owned broadcaster was “boosting its brand and position as a football broadcaster, needless to say in the context of the 2022 World Cup”.

“They tend to follow the strategic direction of Qatar, and if it’s in the emirate’s interests for them to expand in France that is what they are likely to try to do,” Mr Roberts said.