Professional Sport: Let Everything Change, So the Game Endures

Editorial published in the Strategic Intelligence, Diplomacy and Communication Briefing of 18 June 2026 by NSI – Groupe ADIT.

On 29 June, the National Assembly will debate, in public session, the bill on the organisation, management and financing of professional sport; the joint committee is already set for 21 July. Behind its rather opaque title lies one of the most keenly awaited economic reforms in the field, and a deeply political one. Political, first, because professional sport fills the weekends, the conversations and sometimes the mood of millions of French people. And political, too, because the bill arrives just as the internal balance of professional football begins to shift after five years of crisis: new leaders, new alliances, and a long-marginal idea that the value of a league is built collectively.

A bill born of crisis, driven by Parliament

This bill draws its strength from where it began: a twofold crisis. A revenue crisis, first. The Mediapro debacle, the collapse of DAZN and piracy that the French audiovisual regulator ARCOM puts at 290 million euros in lost revenue every year have stripped French football of its leading source of income in under five years. And a deeper crisis of the model itself: an economy that had gradually organised around a single engine, Paris Saint-Germain (international rights, exposure, resources), while the rest of the pack fell away.

It was this twofold diagnosis that led the Senate to launch an inquiry, vested with the powers of a commission of investigation, into the failings of French football. Out of its work came the bill jointly tabled on 18 March 2025 by Laurent Lafon and Michel Savin, passed almost unanimously by the Senate on 10 June 2025, then cleared on 13 May this year by the National Assembly’s cultural affairs committee after extensive work: 135 amendments, four rapporteurs from different groups, a text that grew from 25 to 37 articles. Cross-party consensus of that kind is rare in the corridors of the Palais-Bourbon. It says something simple: almost no one still believes that professional football will reform itself.

An economic challenge of the first order

The figures are stark. The domestic broadcasting rights for Ligue 1, which topped one billion euros in 2018, fell to 400 million in 2024-2025 before collapsing further still: the Ligue 1+ platform generates revenue of around 150 million euros. The Premier League, by contrast, brings in close to 2 billion per season from its domestic rights alone, and more again internationally. Next season, a single English club, Liverpool, will earn more in television rights than every Ligue 1 club combined. Yet none of this is inevitable: France remains one of the world’s leading exporters of players. Its national team has reached the last two World Cup finals. Paris Saint-Germain are two-time European champions. The stadiums are full. The talent and the potential are there; it is the organisation that lags behind.

And that failing organisation puts a very real professional sports economy on the line: nearly 7 billion euros of activity, more than 45,000 jobs, 1.4 billion euros in tax and social contributions. It is, above all, wealth rooted in the regions. A professional club means direct and indirect jobs, a stream of orders for hundreds of small and mid-sized businesses, a town’s name carried each week through the media across Europe. When a club goes under, an entire local area suffers. Several local and regional authorities have learned that the hard way in recent months, in football and beyond.

A sweeping reform of governance

Professional football is currently run by the LFP, an association under the 1901 law whose clubs are members, not shareholders. The distinction looks merely legal; in fact it governs everything. The system rests on an elected president whose first task is to build a majority and then keep it. Every economic decision (how rights are shared, how they are marketed) thus becomes an internal political one, negotiated club by club, reversible as alliances shift, and for which no one is truly answerable, since responsibility dissolves into the collective. The federation, though it holds the public-service delegation, is tied to this structure only by an agreement, with no seat in the body that markets the rights.

The law makes it possible to replace this with an ordinary commercial company bringing together the federation and the clubs. Two things change fundamentally. The clubs become shareholders, holding preference shares: their rights no longer hinge on a perpetually renegotiable balance between association members. And the running of the business shifts from the logic of an elected mandate to the logic of a company: professional executives, with genuine operational autonomy, carry out a strategy and answer for it before a board and shareholders, rather than an elected official governing by keeping his coalition onside. The federation, for its part, sits within the company with prerogatives that the law enshrines. This is the grammar of the Premier League: commerce to the clubs, guardianship of the fundamentals of the game to the federation. With the public safeguards this requires: rules on conflicts of interest, caps on remuneration, declarations to the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life (HATVP), and possible oversight by the Court of Auditors.

Why dwell so much on the architecture? Because no one extends ten years of trust to a structure that can reinvent itself every season. Broadcasters and investors sign with a company whose governance is stable and whose commitments are enforceable. The reform is not an administrative formality ahead of a fresh tender; it is the commercial condition for one.

Then comes the issue that crystallises everything: how the money is shared. Article 7 caps the gap in domestic-rights distribution between clubs in the same competition at a ratio of 1 to 3, down from 1 to 5 today. Behind that ratio lies a theory of value: the leagues that sell best are those that share most evenly, because uncertainty over the result is precisely the product being sold. Across the Channel, the gap in payouts between the champion and the bottom club last season was only 1 to 1.6. And on this point the landscape has shifted: several major clubs and their new leaders, often drawn from media and telecoms (Olympique de Marseille under Stéphane Richard, Stade Rennais now chaired by Nicolas de Tavernost), are publicly arguing for this more equitable split. Yesterday’s most contested provision has become the rallying point for a majority of clubs. Combined with newly restored freedom to package the rights into separate lots, and with Europe’s most advanced anti-piracy arsenal (automated, real-time blocking under the oversight of an ARCOM now armed with the power to sanction), it sets the framework for the next tender.

Part of the bill still up for debate

Some of the reservations voiced nonetheless deserve a hearing. The main one concerns a temptation that has surfaced through the debates: writing exposure requirements into law, to the point of mandating free-to-air broadcasts of matches. The intention is understandable; the effect would run counter to the aim. Every free-to-air match is value taken away from subscriptions at the very moment that revenue needs rebuilding, and the balance between exposure and monetisation is a strategic economic choice that belongs to those who finance the model. The law plays its proper part when it modernises governance and sets the guarantees; it oversteps when it substitutes itself for the decisions of the very structure it has just made worthy of trust. The session of 29 June and the joint committee of 21 July will show whether that line holds.

The next frontier is European

The Assembly has, moreover, broadened the bill well beyond football: leagues and dedicated commercial companies for women’s sport, financial solidarity between the men’s and women’s games, protection of athletes from harassment by bettors, and tighter rules on betting for 18-to-25-year-olds.

One question, however, has been deliberately left open: multi-club ownership. The bill sets out its first safeguards while preserving the appeal of French clubs to international capital, as we are seeing again with Nice and Montpellier, both currently being acquired by foreign investors. In a market for players and capital integrated at continental scale, a purely national ban would be both ineffective and self-defeating.

It is at European level that France is carrying this work forward, and so the sequence will end neither on 29 June nor on 21 July. The success of the revamped Champions League format and the creation of UC3, the commercial company bringing together UEFA and Europe’s clubs, prove that a negotiated overhaul is possible at the top of the game. Financial regulation, the prospect of a continental salary cap, stronger protection for home-grown talent: these are the projects that will determine the sustainable development of Europe’s leading sport. The bill now under discussion is not the end of the story; the return leg will be played in Brussels and Nyon.

In The Leopard, Tancredi declared that everything must change so that nothing changes. Here the lawmaker is making the opposite bet: that everything must change, so that the game endures.

Cyril Mourin, for NSI’s strategic intelligence briefing, 18 June 2026