Ligue 1 2026/27 (M)

On 14 May 1933, at the Stade Olympique Yves-du-Manoir in Colombes, Olympique Lillois beat Cannes 4-3 to win France's first professional championship. That inaugural edition was not settled by a table but by a final between the winners of the two groups. The competition had kicked off on 11 September 1932 under the name National, lasted one season that way, and then became Division 1. The name it carries today arrived only in 2002.

Then came the dynasties. Saint-Étienne piled up ten titles and set the benchmark for decades. Lyon smashed it with seven championships in a row between 2002 and 2008, a run nobody in France had managed before. Nantes and Monaco have eight apiece.

And there is the chapter the country has never filed away: Marseille's 1993 title was stripped when the LFP uncovered that club president Bernard Tapie had bought off opposition players, and Tapie ended up with a two-year prison sentence. Paris Saint-Germain, founded in 1970, arrived late to this list and now tops it with fourteen championships; twelve of them since 2013, which is to say since the Qatari fund QSI bought the club in 2011.

Seventy-six points. That was the number Paris Saint-Germain finished 2025/26 on: a fifth straight championship and the fourteenth in their history. They sealed it on 13 May 2026 by beating Lens 2-0 — the very side that had stayed with them longest, and that ended up second on 70. Behind them came Lille on 61, Lyon on 60 and, level on 59, Marseille and Rennes.

Paris won at both ends of the pitch: 74 goals scored, the sharpest attack, and 29 conceded, the meanest defence. The top scorer, though, came from elsewhere and by an unusual route. Esteban Lepaul hit 21 goals across two shirts: one for Angers and the other twenty for Rennes after a mid-season move. Across the 306 fixtures 863 goals were scored, 2.82 per match.

At the bottom there was no argument. Nantes went down on 24 points after thirteen seasons in the top flight and Metz on 17 after just one; Nice, sixteenth on 32, survived through the play-off. And one figure never shows up in the table: at the midway point the league was averaging 27,505 spectators a match and 88% of capacity, both records, where five years earlier the average was 21,890. The biggest crowd of all: 66,279 at the Vélodrome against Brest.

On Friday 21 August 2026, at 20:45, the Vélodrome opens the season against Strasbourg. On Sunday the 23rd, Paris Saint-Germain begin the defence of their title at the Parc des Princes against Stade Rennais. And in between, on Saturday the 22nd, Le Mans play their first Ligue 1 match since 2009/10 at the Stade Marie-Marvingt.

Up with Le Mans come Troyes, absent from the top flight since 2022/23; going the other way went Nantes and Metz. The dugouts have churned unusually hard for an eighteen-team league: Davide Ancelotti joined Lille on 1 June, Dino Toppmöller took over at Lens on the 16th, Olivier Pantaloni at Nice on the 17th, Bruno Genesio at Marseille on 1 July and Filipe Luís at Monaco on the 6th.

The calendar, unveiled on 10 June, puts the two Classiques at the Vélodrome on 20 September and at the Parc des Princes on 7 February, and runs to a close on 29 May 2027. The extremes of the map are the familiar ones: 66,312 seats in Marseille against the 15,220 of Brest's Francis-Le Blé or the 16,500 of the Louis-II, where Monaco's whole ground fits four times inside the Marseille bowl. That contrast, rather than the Paris budget, is what makes every trip south or to Brittany hard to call.

Eighteen clubs, 34 matchdays, 306 fixtures. It was not always so: in June 2021 the league voted to come down from twenty teams to eighteen, and the cut took effect in 2023/24 after a brutal transition year, with four relegations and only two promotions at the end of 2022/23.

At the top, the leading places hand out Champions League and Europa League berths according to where France sits in the UEFA coefficient, sixth goes into the Conference League play-off round, and the Coupe de France winner enters Europe too. At the bottom, seventeenth and eighteenth drop straight down, while sixteenth keeps one last bullet: a two-legged tie against the winner of the Ligue 2 play-off, pencilled in for 3 and 6 June 2027.

The biggest change here, though, is not in the rulebook but in the remote control. In July 2024 DAZN bought the rights through to 2029 for close to 400 million euros a season, stalled at around 650,000 subscribers against the 1.5 million it had banked on, and the contract blew apart in 2025. The LFP answered by building its own channel: Ligue 1+ launched on 15 August 2025 with the opening matchday, cleared 600,000 subscribers that same weekend and reached 1.026 million by 14 September, hitting its full-season target in a month. French clubs now broadcast themselves.