Television: Football as Spectacle and Commodity
In 1927, Ernest Chamond, Head of
the Compagnie des Compteurs in the Paris suburb of Montrouge, met John Logie
Baird, known in Britain as the inventor of television. Chamond had come over to
London on one of his frequent crosschannel trips to see English League and Cup
football matches. He was a football fan, and English football was recognised as
being the best in the world at the time, since it was there that the modern
game had been invented and professionalism had first developed. Chamond is a
near-forgotten visionary: he immediately saw the commercial future of Baird’s
new invention as serving millions of people who wanted to watch sports events
from their armchair, when it was impossible for them to get to the live event.
Back in Montrouge, in his factory, which originally made metering equipment for
water and gas, and then moved into electrical components, he immediately set up
a new laboratory to investigate television transmission and reception, under
the control of René Barthélemy, who was to become a famous name in the
development of French television. Four years later the first public
demonstration of television broadcasting took place in France between Montrouge
and Ecole Supérieure d’électricité in Malakoff, a nearby suburb. Then, in 1935,
it was following a visit to the Montrouge factory that the French Posts and
Telegraphy Minister, Georges Mandel, set up the first public broadcasting
system in France, transmitting from the Eiffel Tower (Lecoq 1997: 133).
Three-quarters of a century after Chamond’s vision, the biggest sponsor of
football, in both France and England, is television; and the owner of the
biggest club in France, Paris Saint-Germain, is the subscription channel Canal+.
Other media organisations are also involved in football sponsorship in France.
Such are the stakes involved that the future of French digital television is
tied to the selling of pay-per-view subscriptions to French football. The same
may well be true of English Premier League football and BSkyB television.
Certainly, the bankruptcy of ITV Digital, the key financier of England’s other
professional divisions, sent shock-waves through the media and football
industries, not only in England, suggesting as it did that the financial links
between football and television had made both industries very fragile.
This chapter shows how, in France,
as in England, football has become crucial to the commercial success of
television, and how television income became indispensable to modern football’s
modus operandi. The world financial instability of 2002 raised questions about
the future viability of football’s high spending based on TV income. For the
present, football and television appear inextricably linked, symbiotically
linked, just as the very creation of a television service in France is owed, in
part, to an entrepreneur’s passionate interest in football. A further point
that will be argued is that the increasing commodification of football through
the tool of commercial TV and pay-TV has moved at different paces in the two
countries because of (a) the particular tradition of French statism and public
service, and (b) the different speeds of development of national broadcasting
systems. Television and Football before Pay-TV Before the advent of live
pictures, newspaper and radio reporting created a football star system that
shaped the shared folk memory of the game. Radio coverage developed by the end
of the 1920s, although football’s administrators were unsure whether its effect
would be to take spectators away from the stadiums, or spread its popularity
(Thomas et al. 1991: 112), a recurrent dilemma. But it is television that
turned football from a local spectacle to a national one. The first live
pictures were of the final of the French Cup in 1952 at Colombes, Nice vs.
Bordeaux, followed in the same year by France vs. Germany (ibid.: 113). The
League had seen crowds falling off over a number of years and banned television
cameras from the stadiums from December 1955. An agreement to show some live
matches was signed in 1961, and more stable relations achieved from 1972
onwards (ibid.: 113–114). The main successes of French club and national sides
have coincided with the beginnings and later the high points of the era of free
national terrestrial television; that is, before subscription or pay-TV
prevented a fully national audience from seeing games at the same time. It was
in the 1950s, with the innovation of European club competitions and France’s
unexpectedly good performance in the World Cup, that national interest was
aroused in football as a vector of national values. In the World Cup in Sweden
in 1958, France played the early rounds in cities where there was no live
television. Recordings took some days to come back to the minority medium of
television. It was not until the semi-final that France appeared live. Poiseul
(1998: 99) recalls that in the days preceding this eagerly awaited match the
number of French homes owning television sets increased from 1 million to 1.2
million, with the semi-final attracting an estimated audience of 5 million
viewers. The first occasion for the mass transmission of matches on French
television was the Mexico World Cup of 1970 (Bourg 1986: 128).
It was via television coverage that
the European exploits of Saint-Etienne, in the 1970s, caught the national
imagination. So dominating the French domestic competitions between 1964 and
1983, ‘les Verts’ played in Europe almost every season, and as the French
representative with the best chance of progressing, they captured the TV
audience. The Saint-Etienne team had bravura and charisma, and their European
matches had suspense, all the ingredients of good television, which showed
their matches live. Developing more slowly than in Britain, French television
could, by the end of the 1960s, reach a full national audience (Bureau 1986:
97–98) and had improved the notoriously poor quality of coverage since the
1960s (Wahl 1989: 324–326). In 1975 SaintEtienne were losing semi-finalists and
in 1976 losing finalists. In these two years especially, football had offered
the national television audience regular episodes of their top club’s European
saga. The next major footballing event to be followed on television, even more
traumatic in the injustice of the French defeat, was Seville 1982 (see Chapter
6). Thirty million French television viewers sat entranced by the interminable
drama. Such was the perceived importance of the match that a parliamentary
debate was suspended to allow the députés to watch. The intensity of the match,
its long drawn out conclusions, remembers Olivier Margot (Bureau 1986: 97– 98),
plunged a nation of television viewers into a state of shock, drained by the
injustice of it all. Former Prime Minister Chaban-Delmas summed up the general
feeling that the match would live in the collective memory for a long time
(Poiseul 1998: 101). Because the club sides of Reims in the 1950s,
Saint-Etienne in the 1970s and Marseille in the late 1980s–early 1990s so
dominated the French championship in their respective eras with no real home
challenger, it was all the easier for the national public to identify with them
as carrying national values in their European matches through the mediation of
television. Historically, sport has been intimately associated with nation and
place, but this is changing rapidly; now it carries audiences and advertising
across national boundaries. It is one of the key agents of globalisation. And
sport is a peculiarly mobile culture. Most cultural forms are limited in their
ability to travel, most obviously by language, but sport has an extraordinary
ability to communicate. It is therefore the obvious vehicle for multinational
companies to use to sell their products and services. If the only genuinely
global events are the Olympics and the World Cup, it can be argued that they
have become global via television and that they have been hijacked by the
forces of commercialism. The commercialisation of the game would not have
happened to the extent that it did without the presence of TV and its increased
coverage of the game. TV offered (a) new advertising space for businesses, and
(b) new technological developments which provide new ways of selling football
as a product. So satellite TV, cable TV, and digital TV have brought with them
subscription TV and pay-per-view, as well as bringing many more channels that
need new programming to fill the screen time to attract viewers. Sport (and
particularly football) is seen as an excellent marketing vehicle, an excellent
instrument of direct and indirect advertising. And football has been able to
fill this new screen time and sell the new channels since it became the
dominant cultural form of the 1990s – replacing rock music as a purveyor of
values to young people, especially to the difficult television audience of
young men – on an international scale. Income from television rights has
transformed the finances of French soccer, just as it has in England with the
advent of Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB. Advertising and sponsorship began in the late
1960s. An initial move by the FFF and the league in 1968 to sign a global
contract for Vittel to sponsor Division 1 came unstuck when the Bordeaux club,
whose chairman was head of the Bordeaux wine growers association, refused to
wear the logo of a mineral water on their shirts (Bourg 1986: 106). Public
service television, holding a monopoly of television channels in France at the
time, initially objected to sponsorship on shirts as a form of illegal
advertising, but eventually agreement was reached and revenue increased
somewhat after the splitting up of the State television service into three
competing but still publicly owned channels in 1975, financed by licence fee
income supplemented by advertising income. In France as in England the commercialisation
of football took place in close symbiosis with changes in how television was
distributed and sold. In the UK Murdoch and Sky’s subscription TV eroded the
BBC–ITV duopoly as providers of free-to-air terrestrial TV; in France the
erosion of the State monopoly of public service free-to-air TV came in 1984
with the creation of Canal+, the first subscription TV company. Additionally,
1987 saw the privatisation of the topaudience channel TF1. There followed an
immediate bidding-up of TV rights as Canal+ competed with TF1 for live TV
football. The two major television companies were now dependent on audience:
the one for selling subscriptions and the other for attracting advertising
revenue. More TV exposure also allowed greater income to football from
sponsorship: a leap from 15 million francs in 1978 to 120 million in 1982 and
170 million in 1986, divided between the D1 and D2 clubs (Wahl 1989: 334).
Advertisers and sponsors were of course interested in the huge TV audiences
football could bring them, at least for high-profile matches: 30 million
viewers for the World Cup semi-final France vs. Germany in 1982; 20 million
viewers for the European Nations Cup Final France vs. Spain in 1984. The
national team played only occasionally, however, and the European Cups were far
from being weekly events in the 1980s. If audiences could be won for a weekly
or twice-weekly diet of televised club football – which also required the
league to agree – then that would take television and football onto a new level
of symbiosis. Canal+ and the Take-over of PSG It was Canal+’s take-over of
Paris Saint-Germain that heralded this new era in French football, as the first
step towards a new dimension in football’s commercialisation. Television
offered football a major new source of revenue, and greater access to
sponsorship and corporate interest. Until the mid-1980s, the whole of French
television had remained a State-run monopoly. Advertising revenue did come into
the three national channels, but they were essentially all run on public
service lines. When Mitterrand’s socialist governments decided it was
politically expedient to inaugurate various forms of independent television
between 1984 and 1986, they opted first for a subscription channel. Canal+ was
to be chaired by President Mitterrand’s personal friend and former director of
his private office, André Rousselet, head of the advertising group Havas, with,
as his executive director, Pierre Lescure who had a background in commercial
radio. The initial remit was to be a film channel which showed large numbers of
cinema films and invested in the French film industry. It indeed puts money
into four out of five French-made films. But both of its patrons also had an
interest in sport. They initially showed a number of minority sports such as
American football, bullfighting, and indeed golf (a minority interest in France
at the time) (Jeanneney 2001: 192–196). Canal+’s interest in football was
different from that of other business interests already investing in clubs, in
that they foresaw a much more direct link between the business of football and
their own business. They had seen OM dominate the French championship for three
years with Bernard Tapie’s money, which meant the French League lacked the
week-to-week drama of true competition and the uncertainty of outcome, and
therefore suspense, that can draw interest. Their strategy was to turn PSG, who
had not done well in the late 1980s and early 1990s, into a big team capable of
rivalling OM. Since Paris and Marseille were geographically and culturally the
biggest potential rivals within French soccer, this would increase interest in
soccer in general and attract more subscriptions for their coverage of football
(Michel 1996). They invested in exclusive weekly live matches from 1992. As
with the purchase of Tottenham Hotspur by the satellite dish manufacturer Alan
Sugar in the same year, a company with a vested interest has a better chance of
influencing future relations between football and television from the inside as
chairman of a big league club than from the outside (see Conn 1997: 9–21). In
the face of PSG’s 51 million francs of debts following the departure of
Chairman Borelli, Canal+ presented its rescue plan in association with the City
of Paris under mayor Jacques Chirac. The organiser of the take-over was the
treasurer of the club Bernard Brochand, a former director of the advertising
and travel agency Havas, and Chairman of DDB Needham International. On 31 May
1991 PSG was reborn, with Brochand as President, with a new structure. The
Association sportive PSG held 51 per cent of the capital of the SAOS (the
football club as such) whose chairman was the then Director-General of the
television company, Pierre Lescure. Canal+ held 40 per cent of the capital, and
the remaining 9 per cent was held by individuals (Halba 1997: 68). They gave
free rein, as chief executive of the club, to Michel Denisot, a Canal+
presenter and hitherto chairman of the small Châteauroux club he had been
successfully steering through the regional leagues into Division 2. As part of
the deal a Canal+ company was also to hold the concession for the Parc des
Princes stadium, and therefore sell in-stadium advertising, passing on a part
of the income to the club (ibid.: 68). The Paris municipality also agreed to
wipe the PSG slate clean of its debts. An annual budget of 120 million francs
was fixed, of which 30 million was a municipal subsidy, 30 million from Canal+,
the rest coming from season tickets, gate money, sponsorship and broadcasting
rights. The use of the Parc des Princes as the home stadium, on the edge of
Paris, in a smart district of the city and with relatively easy access on the
metro system, automatically gave glamour and standing to the club, as well as
providing space for large crowds, since, until the creation of the Stade de
France in 1998, the Parc was the serving national stadium for football, rugby,
and other sports. Canal+ has been so successful overall that it has used its
pay-TV expertise to spread its football-led strategy in a European expansion of
pay-TV. It owns, either in whole or in part, similar channels in Italy
(Telepiù), Spain, Belgium, Poland, and Holland. It fused in 1997 with the Dutch
group Nethold that runs subscription channels in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and
Holland, creating the biggest pay-TV company in Europe with 10 million
subscribers (Jeanneney 2001: 195). Canal+ also invested in the Swiss club
Servette. In the late 1990s the French channel was spending a quarter of its
budget on its sports programming, for 8.6 per cent of its screen time. But for
pay-TV the key figure is not the length of time viewers spend in front of their
channel, it is the number of subscriptions sold, and football sold
subscriptions. The nation’s top participation sport, football, has become its
top TV sport. In the 1990s the biggest sporting draws on TV were, in order,
World Cup matches, European Cup finals, French Cup finals, five-nations rugby,
the final of French Open tennis, the Tour de France (Thomas et al. 1991: 114).
Football’s pre-eminence as high audience television has been recognised by
advertisers being ready to pay 550,000 francs per 30-second advert in the TF1
France– Romania match in the European Nations Cup in 1996 (R.B. 1996a).
Reciprocally, football has come to
rely on television-related income. The income from TV rights shared among D1
and D2 clubs quadrupled between 1991 and 1996. While income was only
approximately a third of the TV revenue received by clubs in England,
television rapidly became a principal source of income for French clubs. It
brings in direct and indirect income that has become crucial to clubs like PSG.
In its 1996/97 budget of nearly 280 million francs, 60 million came from paying
spectators for matches in the domestic context, 30 million for gate receipts
from participation in Europe, 34 million as a grant from the City of Paris, 15
million directly from television, 45 million from participation in a European
competition from television rights, 70 million from its principal sponsors (who
included Canal+), as well as the 300 companies who hired corporate hospitality
boxes in the Parc des Princes. Fifteen million francs came from merchandising,
a new phenomenon in France. There was room for expansion: the number of PSG
shirts sold was only a tenth of the number sold by Manchester United. And
participation in the European Champions League can double the income compared
to playing in one of the other two European competitions (R.B. 1996b; Halba
1997: 68). By 1999 television was the source of 30 per cent of D1 clubs’ income
(Meignan 1999: 40) and by 2002 it had risen to 51 per cent (LNF Infos, 42
(March 2002): 6–7). These developments, especially subscription TV, are part of
the transformation of television viewing into an ordinary consumer act like any
other – buying a TV programme product or a channel. Subscription changes the
relationship between the viewer and the channel into one of customer and
service provider. The logical extension of this philosophy is a choice of
programme via pay-perview. Pay-per-view football has become the latest
incarnation of the TV sports product, and France was the first European country
to reach this stage of TV development, in December 1996. The Multi-channel
Digital-TV Era From the 1996/97 season, Canal+ offered a match-by-match
pay-per-view service, extended since the opening of its digital satellite
transmissions in 1997, widening the options for TV football fans in France. Its
subsidiary CanalSatellite’s pay-per-view service offered every single French D1
match simultaneously live on nine digital channels at a cost of 50 francs (£5)
per match, 75 francs for access to all nine matches on a given evening, or a
‘season ticket’ for 950 francs (working out at 28 francs per match) payable in
ten instalments (1999/2000 figures). The French Football League signed a
five-year exclusivity contract with Canal+ for pay-per-view covering 1996/2001.
Sceptics like Guy Roux, who felt it would empty the stadiums, have since
revised their opinion as crowds have in fact substantially increased in general
(Le Monde, 15 June 1997). The three clubs most in demand on pay-per-view are
PSG, Marseille, and Bastia. The first two have the biggest home following, the
highest priced tickets, and probably the biggest national following, whereas
the Corsican club has a TV audience for the enormous diaspora of Corsican
exiles, and for its home supporters who can less easily cheaply travel away
from the island. The competing service called Multivision, available on cable
and TPS, the digital satellite service in which TF1 is the main shareholder, is
sharing coverage of the European Champions League with TF1, offering a choice
of 12 matches per European night at 34 francs per session (Py 1997). There have
been fears that too much football on TV has been eroding its attractiveness,
and Canal+ dropped its prices in 1997 (Haget 1996: 36). After 15 years of
exclusive coverage of French domestic league football, Canal+ agreed to end its
determination to maintain exclusivity after its main commercial rival put in a
strong bid to the League. Canal+ and TPS concluded a five-year agreement in
summer 1999 to share coverage of domestic matches for five years (Le Monde
interactif, 26 June 1999). Canal+ kept two matches played outside the standard
times (Friday or Sunday evening, plus an early kick-off on Saturday evening),
whereas TPS took one of the matches played on Saturday evenings. Everyone
seemed happy, especially the League that had doubled its income over five
years. Television income to the LNF in 2001/02 was 397 million euros (£250
million), 19 per cent of which went to Division 2. Le Monde concluded that the
parent companies of each, Vivendi for Canal+, and Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux, the
Bouygues group and François Pinault for TPS, had decided to put an end to
hostilities, since prices of various types of programming on digital TV had
been rocketing as a result. French football’s income from TV could be driven up
no further. It is still lagging behind TV income across the Channel. English
Premier League TV income alone was more than twice the amount coming to the two
divisions in France (LNF Infos, 39 (November 2001): 2–3). At the same time as
Canal+ was having more general financial problems, and having to announce a
drop in number of subscribers for the first time ever in 2001 (Le Monde, 7
February 2002), the subscription channel’s interest in PSG started to appear
very expensive, especially when a run of poor results since the late 1990s
resulted in a number of changes of chairman and manager, and in deficits. The
executive chairman has always been a member of the inner circle of Canal+
directors. Initially from 1991 Michel Denisot had led PSG in its most
successful period. In March 1998 it was announced that he was to be replaced at
the end of what was then a disappointing season that was causing discontent
amongst the Parc des Princes public. In fact PSG went on to win the French Cup
in Denisot’s last match in charge. His successor Charles Biétry, founder and
Director of Sport at Canal+, had apparently always wanted the job. He had a
life-long interest in football, had almost played professionally, and had an
irreproachable professional career in television production at Canal+. As Le
Monde put it, Biétry had changed for ever the way football was presented on TV.
However, PSG was eliminated in the first round of the European Cup Winners Cup.
Biétry sacked the manager Giresse. Things did not improve and he resigned in
December 1998, to be replaced by another member of the Canal+ inner circle,
Laurent Perpère, who, in 2000, brought in former player and manager Luis
Fernandez, who had appeared to be waiting in the wings (or rather in the Canal+
studios as an expert summariser) to manage his old club. The signing of Anelka
began to look like an expensive mistake when he left the club in 2002 at a
significant loss. Canal+, like other big business owners, can get very twitchy
when results do not go their way, especially perhaps since there have appeared
other exclusively sports channels in digital television: Eurosport, L ’Equipe-TV,
Pathé-Sport, Infosport, and AB Sports. Additionally, clubs like OM have their
own channel; not that these small channels can hope to afford to buy rights to
show much live football. Rumours circulated in the press in February 2001 that
Canal+ was seeking to sell its majority stake in PSG. An interest in one club
now appears less important than an interest in managing the broadcasting rights
of many more. In May 2001 a rapprochement between Canal+ (owned by Vivendi),
RTL Group (Bertelsmann) and the Darmon group was announced in a joint venture
to rival Kirch. Ninety per cent of its work would be in football, where it
would manage the rights of 320 clubs around the world, more than 40 national
football associations and leagues. Le Monde (23 May 2001) saw this as a way of
gaining access to the very expensive but lucrative World Cup rights. This new
venture added the management of broadcasting rights to other aspects of
Canal+’s interests at different points of football’s ‘chain of production’. It
already produces and distributes television pictures of French D1 and the
Champions League; it controls the richest club in France and sponsors certain
others; it holds the contract from the City of Paris to manage a big stadium,
the Parc des Princes; runs Internet sites for five professional clubs; runs
Zidane’s personal website; holds the exclusive image rights of a number of
professional players such as Ronaldinho, the young Brazilian World Cup winner
playing for PSG; and is getting into sports marketing. Canal+ is certainly the
most powerful player within French football. In order to maintain viewers’
interest in the French League it needs healthy competition between clubs. Just
as it originally took over PSG to ensure a key rival to the then dominant OM,
it reportedly intervened to help the struggling OM in 1995 and in 2001 (Potet
2001c, 2001d, 2001e). PSG and OM are the two clubs that have appeared most
often on Canal+ (146 times each), since they are the most attractive to
subscribers. In 1995, when OM had been relegated and was in financial
difficulty, Canal+ paid an advance of 40 million francs (£4 million) on future
rights to their European games; in 2001 when Bernard Tapie wanted to sell OM
players to buy others, Canal+’s Swiss club Servette Geneva bought three OM
players; Canal+ distributes OMTV via CanalSatellite and reportedly offered to
buy into the Marseille club’s channel since it was in deficit; and Le Monde
also claims that Canal+ invested in Tapie’s son’s sports Internet company
(Potet 2001e). This is not to say there is anything illegal in any of these
deals, but simply that the subscription channel is putting itself into a
position to control the future of French league football and therefore its hold
over football television rights, which after all have remained the primary
motivation for viewers subscribing to Canal+ (France Football, 25 July 2000:
48). Finally, as further evidence of the subscription channel’s financial
influence over French club football, Canal+ is encouraging a change in the big
issue of the early twenty-first century, for European football leagues as a
whole – namely, whether to allow individual clubs to be able to sell their own
broadcasting rights or to retain the system whereby the League sells them en
bloc on behalf of all clubs. L ’Equipe reported (16 February 2001) that sums of
up to 20 million francs (£2 million) had been advanced by Canal+ to certain
French clubs as options on their future individualised television rights
contracts (in Potet 2001c). If French football is very dependent on Canal+, the
latter is very dependent on top flight French football or, rather, on its
continuing ability to attract viewers. Is this construction a house of cards?
April 2002 saw major share-price fluctuations concerning Canal+’s parent company
Vivendi-Universal, whose boss Jean-Marie Messier raised doubts about Canal+’s
future direction by sacking chairman Pierre Lescure ostensibly because of the
channel’s poor financial results.1 The bigger issue was not however Canal+’s
financial problems but the parent company’s over-stretching itself during
Messier’s buying sprees. When Vivendi’s debt problem became impossible to hide,
and subsequently stock market values collapsed more generally, Messier was very
messily and publicly ousted as chairman. It became urgent to consider the
status of all subsidiaries with poor financial results and Canal+ seemed likely
to be sold. Equally, in the context of the sale, the channel’s 90 per cent
ownership of a heavily indebted football club that had stopped winning trophies
or competing in the more lucrative European competitions seemed a liability it
could do without. PSG was therefore put up for sale, with no result at the time
of writing. This was a further indication of the fragility of the dependency of
French club football on television.
Conclusion Professional football
has become crucial to the economics of television in England, France and
world-wide, all the more so in the digital age, as suggested by satellite and
cable television distribution companies’ attempts to buy into football clubs.
Football sells satellite dishes for subscription channels, and it gives
commercial television and their advertisers ‘parts of the national audience
that other programmes cannot reach’ (Critcher 1987: 142). A Eurodata TV study
showed that of the 45 countries covered, in 13 it was a sporting event that had
brought in the top audience of the year. Football was the top television sport
in 13 out of 20 European countries covered. At the time France was somewhat of
an exception (Eurodata 1998). However, the popular effect of 1998 World Cup
mediated through television was to change that. Earlier than in the UK French
television institutions have embraced the new forms of payment that come with
new broadcasting technology: subscription TV in 1984, and then two major
digital TV platforms, CanalSatellite and TPS, and pay-per-view in late 1996 –
which allowed French football to take the leap into blanket pay-per-view
coverage of D1 football from the 1997 season onwards. In doing so they have
missed out a phase in the history of televised football in England, that
Barnett (1995) divides up into three eras:
1. The BBC monopoly period, with
low facility fees being paid by TV to football, and when the public service
principle of universal access was accepted. 2. The duopoly period when ‘live
and exclusive’ matches reflected competition for access between BBC and ITV and
when the value of TV rights rose. 3. The period following deregulation and the
arrival of cable and satellite subscription TV.
In this latest era a new
philosophy of sport comes to the fore, which provides a new revenue stream for
football but which consists of buying up the rights and charging a direct
subscription fee to viewers who want to watch matches, thus breaking the
tradition of TV sport on universal access. In this era TV football has become a
commodity. Barnett argues that revenue-hungry sports governing bodies have
colluded with competitive commercial channels to ‘sell their major events to
smaller audiences for more money’ (1995: 94). The result is that ‘[English]
football is now handcuffed to television, but few can doubt which of the two is
under arrest’. There are fears that the same is true of France – even if they
have come to it via a different route.
What we have seen in France is a
very short middle era of live league football on universal access: the onset of
this era was delayed because of the late commercialisation of French TV;
indeed, subscription TV started before TF1 was privatised. Public sector TV –
where the public service ethos is still alive in France – has, since the
mid-1980s, been financially squeezed out of football coverage through the
competitive bidding up of rights fees by Canal+ and TF1, a competition won of
course by the non-universal access channel. Although French international games
have so far been protected for universal access TV by government decree, French
football missed out on the opportunity of popularising the domestic competition
through a long period of live universal access TV such as happened in England
from the 1970s. At a time when TV fees were low, the French football
authorities were afraid they would lose gate money as TV football competed with
the real version. They therefore refused to allow club football to be shown
live. The fear is that the French TV audience’s interest in domestic club
football is a fragile one, and that it may be transient. If so, the finances of
both league clubs and Canal+ would be seriously compromised at a time when, for
reasons external to football and to Canal+, the channel is under pressure. The
crashes of Kirch in Germany and ITV Digital in Britain were because of
financial over-stretching in buying football rights or of overestimating the
potential audience. In both England and Germany there have been serious effects
on clubs’ financial stability. France may not be immune. Broadcasting and
football have promoted each other’s growth and popularity symbiotically, if
somewhat differently in each country. Firstly, French football finances are
highly dependent on television, and particularly on one company, the Canal+
group. Secondly, for many fans, particularly those who have come recently to
the sport, football has become essentially and exclusively a televisual
experience. Certainly, by universal agreement, Canal+ has improved the coverage
of football on TV – as seen in the technically excellent World Cup coverage.
But it has also been instrumental, with TF1, in changing the way the game is
experienced. The (partial) transformation of football into a televisual
product, one element of home entertainment among others, is reflected in the
ambitions of the head of Canal+’s sports coverage of the World Cup, Charles
Biétry, for further improving television coverage: ‘As long as the viewer is better
off in the stadium than in his living room to watch a match, we will not have
succeeded’ (Biétry 1998, in McKeever 1999: 176). Further questions arise that
concern French football more directly. How do its links to television affect
the values it carries? Are they transforming a live spectacle that once
expressed community identity into a TV-mediated expression of commodity and
commercial values? What issues of football’s governance are raised by this for
the sport’s authorities and indeed for the State and public authorities, given
the latter’s traditionally close interest in sport? Issues of football’s
commercialisation and governance are addressed in the next chapter on football
and business, politics and corruption.
Note
1. The dispute was seen by some as
an attempt to rein in the channel’s editorial independence and another round in
the debate over the future of the French cultural exception (Webster 2002),
which is another arena (cinema film production and distribution) where the
French are attempting to defend specifically French approaches against the
forces of global commerce.
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