Supercomputer · Ligue 1

Plays the rest of the season 10,000 times and shows how often each club wins.

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Ligue 1: 34 rounds and a 16th place left hanging

France has run an 18-club top flight since 2023/24, which trims the season to 34 matches and makes each result count for slightly more of the final total. The top four make up the Champions League zone, fifth and sixth pick up Europa League and Conference League places, and the Coupe de France winner takes a European ticket as well.

Relegation is not a clean two-line answer. Seventeenth and 18th drop directly to Ligue 2, but 16th goes into a promotion-relegation play-off against a second-tier club once the calendar has run out. A projected 16th-place finish is therefore a question left open rather than a verdict either way.

Ligue 1 projection: common questions

How many teams are relegated from Ligue 1?

Two go down automatically, the clubs finishing 17th and 18th. On top of that, the 16th-placed side faces a play-off against a Ligue 2 club for the final place in the following season, so a third team can still lose its top-flight status.

How many matches are there in a Ligue 1 season?

Thirty-four. Ligue 1 cut from 20 clubs to 18 for the 2023/24 season, removing four fixtures per team. Comparisons with older Ligue 1 point totals are therefore misleading: a title-winning haul in the 18-club era is naturally lower than in the 20-club years.

Does fourth place get you into the Champions League in France?

Under France's current allocation, yes: the top four all reach the Champions League. Fifth and sixth are the Europa League and Conference League places, and a Coupe de France win by a club outside those positions pushes the league-based cut-off one spot higher up the table.

▸How does the supercomputer work?

Every remaining fixture is simulated with a Poisson model: each club gets an attack rating and a defence rating from the goals it has scored and conceded this season, and the expected goals of a match come from combining one side's attack with the other's defence, plus a moderate home advantage.

Before a ball is kicked the model does not start from zero: each club begins with a prior strength built from last season's finish and the market value of its squad, with the tails capped so no extreme is absurd. That starting point hands over weight to real results as they arrive, and by around matchday ten only the actual goals are talking.

The remaining season is played 10,000 times in a separate browser process, so the page never freezes. The title, top-four, top-six and relegation percentages are simply how often each outcome happened across those 10,000 seasons, and each club's points range covers the central 90% of its simulated finishes.

What the model does not know: injuries, transfers, sanctions, European fixtures or motivation. It uses goals and only goals — which is why it is in beta.