Who will win the Ligue 1 title in 2024-25? Which clubs will qualify for the Champions League and who will be scrapping for survival? We look at all the key questions with French Ligue 1
predictions for the upcoming season via our trusty Opta supercomputer.
Ligue 1 Season Predictions: The Quick Hits
Favourites for the Title: Paris Saint-Germain tipped for a fourth consecutive Ligue 1 title.
Title Dark Horse: Monaco are PSG’s biggest challengers.
Top Four Favourites: PSG, Monaco, Lille, with Lens and Marseille battling it out for the final spot.
Relegation Favourites: Angers the favourites, with Le Havre, Saint-Étienne and Nantes also tipped to struggle.
After hosting a magnificent Olympic Games, club football is back in France.
Having won the title each of the last three seasons, Paris Saint-Germain open the 2024-25 campaign with a trip to Le Havre on Friday evening. The Opta supercomputer expects PSG to dominate both in that game, and overall, this season in Ligue 1.
As it does every year, we asked it to simulate the 2024-25 season 10,000 times and produce an average ranking based on the results. Unsurprisingly, the reigning champions are the overwhelming favourites to succeed again, but the predictions anticipate a very tight top-flight with a number of contenders for both Champions League qualification and relegation.
An essential thing to understand is that these projections are based on what the Opta supercomputer knows today. So if all Ligue 1 games were to be played now, this is how the model sees the league finishing. Of course, these projections will change throughout the season, thousands of times, based on real-life data powering the seasonal simulations. It doesn’t factor in potential points deductions, a long-term injury to a star striker and it certainly doesn’t have a crystal ball to predict managerial changes.
Nevertheless, these pre-season projections provide an early look at what certain teams might be realistically aiming to achieve in 2024-25. You’ll have seen various 1-18 predictions by publications this summer and you’ve probably made your own, too; see this as a more unique projection without opinion and instead powered by data.
So, without further ado, we run you through the key results of the current Opta supercomputer Ligue 1 2024-25 simulations.
Who Will Win Ligue 1 in 2024-25?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you won’t have landed on this page expecting anything other than a prediction that sees Paris Saint-Germain as overwhelming favourites for the Ligue 1 title. In 2023-24, the Opta supercomputer projected PSG’s title hopes at 55.5% in pre-season. They ended up winning the league by nine points. Now, a year on, the supercomputer is even more bullish on PSG’s chances, with a projected title probability of 79.0%.
Of course, they’ll have to do this without Kylian Mbappé, who has left Paris for Real Madrid this summer, but they are still overwhelming favourites to secure a fourth successive Ligue 1 title – only Lyon (7 between 2002 and 2008) have won more consecutively in France.
The most likely challenge to PSG’s dominance comes from Monaco, who finished in second place last season and won the title in 2024-25 across 8.1% of the supercomputer’s pre-season projections. They last won the league in 2016-17 – with a certain Mbappé in their ranks – but will have to make do without striker Wissam Ben Yedder this season following his departure in the summer. Despite this, they seem well equipped to be PSG’s closest challengers once again this season.
Behind last season’s top two sides, Lille won the Ligue 1 title in 5.5% of pre-season projections after a fourth-place finish in 2023-24, while they were the last side to take the league away from the Parisians in 2020-21.
Outside those three, Lens (1.7%), Marseille (1.4%), Nice (1.3%), and Lyon (1.1%) won the title a collective 551 times in the Opta supercomputer’s 10,000 season simulations. Of those sides, Marseille have been the most active in the transfer market this summer and will hope the arrival of Roberto Di Zerbi from Brighton & Hove Albion might give them some stability that they were lacking last season.
Who Will Qualify for the Champions League?
The top three clubs in Ligue 1 next season will automatically qualify for the UEFA Champions League, and last season there was a surprise podium finisher in Brest. Before a ball was kicked in 2023-24, the Opta supercomputer gave them just a 0.2% chance of doing that, but now their chance of another top-three finish is at 14.8%.
Could lightning strike twice? Well, not according to this season’s projections, with seven other clubs more likely to secure a place in the top three at the end of 2024-25.
Of course, PSG are the most likely team to finish in the top three (97.0%) this season, but the battle to fill second and third place looks like being one to keep an eye on throughout the campaign. Monaco (54.3%) are in with a shout of UCL qualifying for a fourth successive season while, despite finishing fourth in 2023-24, Lille have the next best projected chance of ending in the top three (42.5%).
Led by new projects and the arrival of two respected coaches, Will Still and De Zerbi, the revitalised Lens (21.6%) and Marseille (18.6%) are also well placed to finish inside the top three, while Nice (17.2%) are just above Lyon (15.1%) in the projections. Lyon looked in big trouble in early December last season, sitting bottom of the league after 14 games and five points adrift of 16th place Lorient. However, in their final 20 games of the 2023-24 campaign, they won more points than any other side in Ligue 1 (46), three more than title-winning PSG (43) and six more than Monaco (40).
Rennes (12.9%) are the only other team with a greater than 3% chance of a top three finish in 2024-25, this after their worst league finish for five years last season (10th).
Who Will be Relegated from Ligue 1 in 2024-25?
There are two automatic relegation spots in Ligue 1 this season, with an additional third possible via a relegation play-off. Last season saw Metz lose that play-off to Saint-Étienne and relegated alongside Clermont and Lorient.
This season, there are five clubs who stand out as relegation potentials in the pre-season Opta supercomputer projections, with each having at least a 30% chance of finishing inside the bottom two and falling into Ligue 2.
Unsurprisingly, there are two promoted teams among this group: Angers (44.2%), who only spent one season in Ligue 2 before returning to the first division, and Saint-Étienne (37.4%), a historic club back in the top-flight for 2024-25. Between those two is Le Havre (38.8%) who survived last season despite being the overwhelming favourites for the drop in the pre-season projections last season (73.1%).
Auxerre also won promotion as champions from Ligue 2 last season, but they find themselves as the fifth-likeliest team to be relegated in the Opta supercomputer projections (30.6%), behind Nantes (35.0%), who have finished in the bottom half of the table in five of their last six Ligue 1 seasons.
You would think that Strasbourg might be safe from the drop, with the Opta supercomputer projecting a 6.1% chance of a bottom two finish this season, but Clermont were relegated last season despite a pre-season projected chance of just 5.3% by the supercomputer last season.
Opta-Simulated Ligue 1 2024-25 Table
After simulating the 2024-25 season 10,000 times, we’re able to average the points total of every club across those simulations and therefore rank teams positionally. Here are the Opta supercomputer results from those simulations:
1st: Paris Saint-Germain – 73.3 average points
2nd: Monaco – 60.8
3rd: Lille – 58.8
4th: Lens – 54.6
5th: Marseille – 54.0
6th: Nice – 53.5
7th: Lyon – 52.9
8th: Brest – 52.7
9th: Rennes – 52.2
10th: Toulouse – 45.5
11th: Montpellier – 44.5
12th: Reims – 43.2
13th: Strasbourg – 41.1
14th: Auxerre – 33.4
15th: Nantes – 32.6
16th: Saint-Étienne – 32.2
17th: Le Havre – 31.9
18th: Angers SCO – 31.0
How Does the Opta Supercomputer Model Work?
• Opta’s League Prediction model estimates the likelihood of teams finishing in each position in the competition. We can therefore see how successful a team’s season is likely to be, whether it’s their relegation or title chances.
• The model estimates the probability of each match outcome (win, draw or loss) by using betting market odds and Opta Power Rankings. The odds and rankings are based on historical and recent team performances.
• The model considers the strength of opponents by using these match outcome probabilities and simulates the remaining fixtures in the competition thousands of times. By analysing the outcome of each of these simulations, the model can see how often teams finished in each league position to create our final predictions.
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