Broadcaster DAZN is offering customers in France a three-month subscription to watch Ligue 1 matches if they buy a McDonald’s meal.
The first 120,000 customers that order meals from the special Ligue 1 menu on McDo+ — France’s McDonald’s delivery app — will be sent an access code that will allow them to watch Ligue 1 matches for the rest of the season. Customers have until April 30 to obtain their subscription.
The deal costs €14.15 (£11.87; $15.39), while a monthly DAZN subscription is €39.99 and a yearly subscription is €29.99 per month. Fans also have the option to watch one Ligue 1 match per matchday for €14.99, with the price dropping to €10 for those under 26.
This is the latest development in what has been an up-and-down first six months of the four-year deal between DAZN and the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), France’s football governing body. Media reports in France previously said that the Ligue 1 deal has seen DAZN only draw in 400,000 subscribers, far less than its target of 1.5 million for the inaugural season of the deal.
The LFP has been involved in a crisis over Ligue 1’s broadcast rights over the past couple of years. It was forced to scrap an auction, which sought to bring in €1billion, over the rights in October 2023 as no takers met the asking price.
Heading into the 2024-25 season, there was no deal in place for Ligue 1 to be broadcast anywhere, before an agreement between DAZN and the LFP was officially announced in August. The deal sees DAZN pay €400million per year for the French rights to eight of the nine Ligue 1 fixtures each weekend. The remaining fixture is broadcast by Qatar’s beIN, who agreed to pay the LFP €100m a year.
These deals are more than 10 per cent down on the amount Amazon Prime and Canal+ paid for the rights over the previous three seasons.
In February, DAZN only sent half of January’s €70m instalment to LFP, with the remaining amount going into an escrow account. The streaming service claimed that the league had not done enough to help tackle digital piracy in France, and that some clubs have not helped DAZN shoulder content for its Ligue 1 platform or with efforts to promote its service.
In response, the LFP announced its intention to take legal action and said that it planned “to firmly defend the interest of French professional clubs” as French football returned to the brink of crisis once again.
On February 28, the LFP confirmed that the two sides had reached a settlement and that DAZN had paid the remainder of the January amount. It also confirmed that both parties were engaged in discussions on the difficulties that been encountered in the early stages of the agreement.
DAZN holds a break clause that enables it to walk away from the deal at the end of this season if subscriber targets are not met.
(Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)