KUALA LUMPUR: The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and the Lagardère Sports agency are on the verge of renewing a major marketing and media rights deal.

The new eight-year deal would supercede the current US$1bn agreement, signed between the AFC and the Lagardère Sports-owned World Sport Group agency in 2009, that is scheduled to run until 2020.

The deal is being negotiated without a formal tender process and will likely comprise exclusive marketing and media rights for major competitions sanctioned by the 47-member AFC.

Lagardère Sports chief operating officer Andrew Georgiou told Reuters that the two parties had “had negotiations and expect to renew the contract.”

The AFC, a World Sport Group partner since 1993, is led by possible FIFA presidential candidate Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa of Bahrain.

Lagardère opened negotiations on a new deal with Sheikh Salman shortly after he took the AFC presidency at the start of the year.

Talking to SportsPro for an exclusive feature interview in August, IMG Events and Media president Ioris Francini indicated that competitor agencies had been locked out of the process for the AFC rights.

“Unfortunately, football has traditional conservative barriers to entry one way or the other. It’s been impossible, even with very aggressive numbers, to get anywhere near the AFC,” Francini told SportsPro.

“We made a bid of US$2.5 billion over eight years. Today it’s worth US$900 million over that period. We offered two and a half times that. Didn’t get anywhere near it. We understand that there’s been a quiet renewal with World Sport Group.”

Speaking to SportsPro a month later, in September, Lagardère Sports chief operating officer Andrew Georgiou would not confirm that a renewal had been signed, saying only: “It’s a long-term deal. We have all the commercial rights and we see the relationship between sponsorship, the media sales and the digital platforms as being much more related to one another.

“We’re creating digital platforms now where sponsors are able to incorporate in their sponsorships access to digital platforms and we are incorporating sponsors as part of our broadcast platforms.

“A sponsor that’s looking to sponsor AFC now can actually integrate a lot more into the live programming, post-produced programming, into digital platforms, and we do the production as well. It’s quite an integrated approach and we see real growth in value as a result of being able to do that.”

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AFC and Lagardère to wrap up ‘quiet renewal’
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