Europa 7 offered €100,000 ($137,000) for the rights for the remainder of this season plus €4.1 million for the rights for next season, 2011-12. The league rejected the offer, which was the only one on the table, leading the broadcaster’s chief executive Francesco Di Stefano to complain that Europa 7 had made the same offer the league had accepted from Dahlia during attempts to renegotiate its rights deal prior to going into liquidation in January.
“What sort of tender is this?” Di Stefano said, “We made exactly the same offer as Dahlia and I don’t understand why it was not considered adequate. We were prepared to distribute 200,000 decoders to enable the Dahlia subscribers to see the matches free until June. Like this, they’re just protecting Mediaset’s interests.”
The league chief executive Maurizio Beretta said that the offer had been rejected because the league had to “protect the value of the product.” The league said that the Europa 7 offer was not the same as Dahlia’s proposal – an offer which was scuppered when Telecom Italia refused to provide Dahlia with digital-terrestrial distribution at a massively reduced rate. First, antitrust rules meant that the league could only consider an offer for the remainder of this season. Second, the proposal put forward by Dahlia involved the league producing coverage of the eight teams and distributing it on any digital-terrestrial platform, rather than the league selling an exclusive licence for the rights to Dahlia.
The league also said that media reports which claimed that during Friday’s assembly the league had proposed providing the rights free-of-charge to Mediaset, without the broadcaster having made an offer, were “grave and biased.”