Betclic Élite 2026/27 (M)

The French championship has been played since 1921, but the league as it is known today starts in 1987, when the Ligue Nationale de Basket took charge of the professional competition. There were titles before; since then there has been a league, with its calendar, its relegation and its play-off.

The honours list looks spread out and is concentrated underneath. ASVEL of Villeurbanne hold 21 titles, Limoges CSP 11 and Pau-Lacq-Orthez 9: three clubs, more than forty championships. The first two are not merely provincial names. On 15 April 1993, at the Final Four in Athens, Limoges won the European Cup against Benetton Treviso 59-55, having knocked out Real Madrid 62-52 in the semi-final. They remain the only French club ever to win it.

Since then the league has moved position on the European map: it exports before it wins. Three NBA number one picks have come out of it in four years, and that is its calling card abroad today — even though the players who leave no longer play the championship that made them.

Monaco won the 2026 title, and they took the long road. The final against Paris Basketball went to a fifth game and was settled on 23 June in Paris, a 101-92 win that closed the series 3-2. Two days earlier Monaco had won at home 96-84 to force that last trip.

The table made it no surprise: Monaco finished the regular season with the best record in the league and arrived at the play-off as the team to be dethroned. The opponent was the surprise. Paris Basketball were promoted to the top flight in 2023 and in three seasons went from newcomers to playing for the championship in their own building, the Adidas Arena, while much of the league still plays in five-thousand-seat halls.

At the bottom, Le Portel finished with the worst record of the sixteen. The distance between those two ends is why this league is almost always decided among the same four clubs — and fought over, every year, by whoever is trying not to be one of the two who go down.

The season opens on 25 September 2026 and the regular phase runs to 9 May 2027: 240 games, thirty per team. Monaco defend with the biggest budget in the league and a roster built to compete in Europe at the same time — which is exactly what tends to scramble April calendars.

ASVEL are the natural counterweight again. They are the most decorated club in France and have spent years alternating European ambition with domestic obligation; their rivalry with Monaco is not only sporting, because it sets a Principality project funded from outside against a club that carries the name of Villeurbanne and twenty-one championships. Paris Basketball arrive for a third straight year as the team that has changed the map most: they are the ones who fill the building.

And underneath there is a whole league playing a different championship. Sixteen teams, two relegation places and an eight-team play-off mean half the table reaches March with something at stake, which is more than most leagues its size can say.

Sixteen teams, home and away against everyone: thirty rounds to sort the table. Out of it come two different competitions played at the same time.

At the top, the first eight go through to the play-off. Quarter-finals are best-of-three, semi-finals and the final best-of-five — a format the league adopted in 2013 that rewards home advantage without making it decisive: in short series, one bad game on the road costs the season. The champion of France is whoever wins the final, not whoever finishes first across the thirty rounds, and the two do not always coincide.

At the bottom, two clubs go down to the second tier, and that detail changes entirely how the standings read. In a sixteen-team league with eight play-off places and two relegation spots, only six clubs can reach the closing rounds with nothing to win or lose. It is why April rounds so rarely contain dead rubbers.