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Its five-year sponsorship with Uber Eats is almost over. Next season, the top-flight of French football will be officially known as Ligue 1 McDonald’s.
This is about to bring a whole new layer to the farmers’ league jokes.
Following the end of its five-year sponsorship with Uber Eats, France’s top-flight domestic football league has just handed its naming rights to another commercial giant.
Next season, the nation’s best outfits will officially be competing in the Ligue 1 McDonald’s. The deal is reportedly worth €60 million over the next three years, which is a significant bump from the €15 million it had been receiving yearly from Uber Eats.
Ignoring the obvious irony of a global junk food consortium becoming synonymous with top level sport, the deal has lifted French football out of a sticky situation. Canal+ notified the league that it would not bid for television rights for the first time in 40 years, and no other offers for investment have come in.
At the same time the league’s reining force, Paris Saint Germain, is on the cusp of losing Ligue 1’s biggest superstar Kylian Mbappe as Real Madrid advance negotiations. When Los Blancos came calling last summer, President Emmanuel Macron personally intervened to plead for one more season in France.
‘He [Macron] told me: “I want you to stay. I don’t want you to leave now. You are so important for the country,”’ revealed Mbappe in September 2022.
With the inevitable commercial slump that will come with the 25-year-old’s departure, French football executives are understandably keen to latch onto the offer from McDonald’s. From a credibility point of view, however, the partnership will do Ligue 1 no favours.
