Gerhard Zeiler, chief executive of the German unit of Europe's largest television firm RTL Group, said the League's ratings were too low as the extended qualifying phase included too many unimportant matches.

'Even if the license price was halved, I would think five times before I continued with the Champions League,' Zeiler told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in an interview to be published on Friday.

'I don't expect that we will continue to have the Champions League in the program after the next season,' Sueddeutsche quoted Zeiler as saying.

Prices for movie and sports TV rights, which appeared to be perfectly normal during high-profile bidding wars two years ago, have come under scrutiny recently as media groups struggle with lower advertising revenues.

Insolvency administrators have blamed overpriced rights deals for the collapse of Germany's KirchMedia, one of the largest television rights traders in Europe.

A spokesman for RTL Group, which owns 23 television stations in Europe and posted a 2.5-billion-euro ($2.23 billion) net loss in 2001, said the drive to cut prices was not limited to its German subsidiary.

'We will put pressure on the pricing for both sports and movie rights,' said Markus Payer, a spokesman for the RTL Group. 'The prices must come down.'

RTL bought the rights to broadcast Champions League from media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for an undisclosed sum after Murdoch pulled out of his German television channel Vox in 2000.

RTL reportedly paid News Corp only half of the 220 million marks ($99 million) that they had paid per season to the soccer's European governing body, UEFA.

A spokesman for RTL said their deal to broadcast the Champions League expired in the 2002/2003 season. There were no new talks yet on a continuation of the contract, the spokesman said.