In this essay, we have studied whether the Swedish newspaper Sportbladet reporting on the French football league (Ligue 1) is different from the season before to season after Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s arrival at Paris Saint-Germain FC in the summer of 2012. The teories that we applied were news values, framing and personalization. In order to complete our investigation, we used two different methods: a quantitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis to see if the news valuation and framing are different, but also to see what impact Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s arrival has on the media coverage of the league. The result of the quantitative content analysis and the critical discourse analysis shows huge differences between 2011/12 and 2012/13 seasons. Sportbladet published ten times as many articles during Zlatan’s debut season in the league in comparasion with the previous season. The articles became generally larger, better placed in the newspaper and contained more columns about the subject. We could also note more focus on individuals in the articles. This change is mainly explained by the increased geographical and cultural proximity during the 2012/13 season, which arose in connection with Ibrahimovic’s transfer from Milan to Paris Saint-Germain. The result was pretty much as we had expected. The 2012/13 season was way more covered with a particular focus on Zlatan and his team in the articles. That shows what kind of importance a national super star like Zlatan Ibrahimovic has on the reporting from the French league.

Le football professionnel est devenu une industrie du spectacle audiovisuel dont il tire une partie importante de ses revenus. Cependant, les recettes dites Matchday et les revenus annexes de la billetterie constituent un gisement de croissance important pour les clubs français. Ceux ci devraient pouvoir maitriser les capacités offertes au public du spectacle vivant dans les stades et devenir propriétaires de leurs enceintes en utilisant la technique des baux emphytéotiques. Les politiques de prix variables ou de prix dynamiques conduites dans d’autres secteurs comme les transports, l’hôtellerie ou les centres de loisir sont applicables dans la gestion de la billetterie. La digitalisation de l’offre ouvre de nouvelles perspectives de relation client. Elle améliore la traçabilité des consommateurs et permet de déterminer leur propension optimale à payer. Les solutions de CRM, Customer Relationship Management améliorent la connaissance client et permettent de mieux segmenter l’offre pour mieux adresser les différents publics du stade. Dans une activité fondée sur l’incertitude du résultat mais sur la certitude des coûts de production, les ressources digitales permettent de fidéliser les différentes catégories de fans et d’augmenter le panier moyen. Les clubs français très engagés dans la gestion à court terme ont négligé les outils du pricing et tardent à adopter les solutions digitales qui ont donné des résultats satisfaisants dans des secteurs comparables. Nous formulons des propositions adossées à des expérimentations concrètes pour augmenter les performances de la billetterie dans le secteur de l’industrie du football en France. / Football has become a major industry of entertainment for TV networks and also for companies running football squads. TV rights represent at least 50% of the French clubs incomes. Meanwhile, most of them have disregarded Matchday revenues. For a large majority of them, they don’t own their arenas. Moreover, they play in (too) large stadiums with overcapacities according to average attendances. This is why average prices are below the European average price when we compare French League One with the other major’s championships in Europe. In this field, we suggest long-term leases between public owners and football firms in order to transfer both property and ability to refit arenas and stadiums. In addition, French firms running football clubs have not yet fully used technics of variable prices and dynamic prices. They should also display CRM resources in order to address each segment of costumers, including fans, year ticket holders, walk in customer or families. The target is to hit as close as possible the willingness to pay of each category of customers. We have experienced such policies for Year ticket holders in French third division. Digital resources increase customer insights and sustain cross selling policies increasing revenues as it is done in other comparable sectors such as air transportation, leisure parks, hotels and resorts. We make some suggestions and recommendations to strengthen home revenues in the French professional football League.