Supercomputer · Première Ligue

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

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Première Ligue: first place is a semi-final ticket, not the trophy

The French women's top flight decides its champion in a play-off. Twelve clubs play 22 rounds from the first weekend of September, and the four best then meet in semi-finals in mid-May and a final in early June. Winning the regular season earns the best seeding and nothing else, which is why this page shows 1st place.

The top-four line is therefore the one that shapes the season, and it sits close to the European line as well, with three continental places at stake. At the other end, two of the twelve are relegated to the Seconde Ligue — a sixth of the division, and in a 22-game season that leaves very little slack.

Première Ligue: play-offs and relegation

How is the French women's champion decided?

By a play-off among the top four of the 22-round regular season. The semi-finals are scheduled for 15 and 16 May 2027 and the final for 4 or 5 June. Winning the regular season does not win the title, which is exactly why the first column here reads 1st place.

How many clubs go down from the Première Ligue?

Two, from a division of twelve, dropping into the Seconde Ligue. With only 22 matchdays there is far less time to recover from a poor run than in a 34- or 38-game league, so relegation probabilities on this page move sharply after just a handful of results.

Does finishing first in the regular season count for anything?

It secures the best seeding into the semi-finals and puts a club at the front of the queue for France's three European places, but it is not the championship. Regular-season leaders still have to win a semi-final in May and then the final in early June to lift the trophy.

▸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.