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France Ligue 1 or Ligue 1 for short is the top-ranked football league in France. The league was founded in 1932, well before World War 2. Today, the league has twenty active teams and has been battling ever since the first season broke 85 years ago. Bet on the next game using your Bitcoins on teams like Amiens, Angers, Bordeaux, Monaco, PSG, Troyes, and a whole lot more. Below are the upcoming betting odds for the next games:
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The Ligue 1 is the highest division in French men’s football; from 1932 to 2002 it was called Division 1 or Première Division (D1). It was a professional league from the very beginning. There have been French championships since 1894, but it is only since 1932 that winning the championship (Championnat de France) counts as an official title.
In a country where this sport still lagged behind cycling, boules and rugby in public favour until the last third of the 20th century, it took a long time for professional football to become one of the five strongest leagues in Europe at the turn of the millennium. Today, top football in France is much more globalised and therefore more confusing, but it still has some very “French” characteristics.
This development is due to the general conditions, forms of organization and structures outside France as well as country-specific ones, which have shaped the face of French football in the 85-year history of the league – far beyond its three “big names” Kopa, Platini and Zidane and its first island successes (at the end of the 1950s and in the 1980s) – and which are described in detail here.
Prehistory
Almost four decades passed from the first national championships (1894, still limited to Paris) to the formation of a uniform league covering the entire country, during which championships and cup competitions were nevertheless held. There are a number of reasons for this – at least in comparison to the “football motherland” England – long start-up time, which are partly typical for the early history of football throughout Europe, but partly also related to specific French conditions.
A major reason for this was the diversity of associations (or, to put it in negative terms, the organisational disunity) of French sport until after the First World War: a single association, the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA), existed only from 1887 to 1905; between 1905 and 1919, on the other hand, there were up to five competing associations in which football clubs were organised and their respective masters determined (more details here). In 1908, they created a common umbrella organisation (Comité Français Interfédéral, CFI), but it was not until 1913 that all football organisations joined; and as early as 1914, the First World War interrupted all unification efforts for more than four years, before these efforts led to the foundation of the Fédération Française de Football Association (FFFA, later only FFF) in 1919.
This did not, however, pave the way for a nationwide professional league, as the CFI had reached an agreement with Édition Hachette which initially prevented this: Hachette sponsored the Coupe de France, the national cup competition launched in 1917/18, with 5,000 francs a year, in return for which it had the right to be assured that no other national competition could be held until 1928. In addition, the start of the league was delayed in the following years due to the effects of the global economic crisis and the disputes between advocates and opponents of the professionalisation of sport.
The emergence of disguised professionalism
Professionalisation in football was not a completely new topic in France. France’s national goalkeeper Pierre Chayriguès, as he himself admitted at the end of the 1920s, received 500 francs in 1911 for his move to Red Star Paris and then earned a monthly fixed salary of 400 FF plus victory bonuses of 50 FF each. After international matches, he regularly collected a four-figure sum from the FFFA office, which the association – whose president Jules Rimet was a declared advocate of the amateur idea – declared as “travel expenses”, “loss of earnings” or “medical expenses”. Chayriguès could therefore afford to refuse a lucrative offer from Tottenham Hotspur in 1913 (the talk was of 25,000 FF) to play in England.
However, the topic only became virulent after the First World War, because from 1919 onwards the FFFA was able to push through a unification in favour of amateurism, while until 1914/18 the associations had dealt with this question with varying “generosity”. Many clubs then developed various forms of secret professionalism, such as existed in Germany before the introduction of the Bundesliga. Some clubs were supported by local companies which maintained a company sports club and were thus able to offer jobs or direct payments (such as the automobile manufacturer Peugeot in Sochaux, the retail chain Casino in Saint-Étienne or the sparkling wine producer Pommery & Greno in Reims).
Other clubs lured sought-after players to secure their livelihood by taking over a small business: what used to be the lottery ticket office in Germany was often a bar-tabac in France. Individual popular players also marketed their fame at an early stage; for example, national players Eugène Maës and Henri Bard promoted football boots bearing their names. For some clubs, payments to players in the 1920s were an open secret. At Olympique Marseille, for example, French and foreign international players came season after season not only because of the pleasant Mediterranean climate; at Red Star Paris, two players played after 1924 who had recently won the Olympics with Uruguay; Sports Olympiques Montpelliérains had four renowned players from Switzerland and Yugoslavia in their ranks in 1929; FC Sète added a Hungarian, an Algerian and another Serbian national player to the “contingent of foreigners” in their squad (three British and one Yugoslav) in 1930 …
The proof of this disguised professionalism, which the French call l’amateurisme marron (to be translated as “tricky amateurism”), however, was difficult for the FFFA: In 1923 they excluded FC Cette (now Sète) from the cup competition because their Swiss player Georges Kramer had not been resident in France for half a year – but another association committee decided months later with a majority vote that this did not justify the severe penalty (which is why Sète was even allowed to catch up on the missed cup rounds; for more details see here). Inevitably, Sète’s long-standing president Georges Bayrou was one of the most stubborn advocates of the introduction of official professionalism, which he promoted in the press and at all levels of the association.
So if the FFFA could not prevent the payment of players, it had to be interested in steering this development in an orderly fashion and thereby controlling it. The French association then – unlike, for example, the German Football Association, which also had to deal massively with this schism in 1929/30 (“Fall Schalke”, foundation of the German Professional Football Association) – decided relatively quickly to take an offensive approach to sham amateurism.
The Coupe Sochaux
It was FC Sochaux, which had only recently been founded, that played a decisive role in setting the pace for the introduction of a nationwide league: in 1930, with the approval of the FFF, the club sponsor donated a trophy, the Coupe Sochaux, and invited the seven teams that were thought to be the strongest to take part in this competition, which took place largely in league mode alongside FC Sochaux: two each from the north (Lille Olympique, RC Roubaix), the south (Olympique Marseille, FC Sète) and Paris (Red Star, Club Français) and one from the east (FC Mulhouse). The competition ended in 1931 with the host’s 6-1 final win over Lille. The following year (1931/32), the competition was repeated, this time with 20 participants (winner: FC Mulhouse, 4-2 against Stade Français Paris), and the public response showed the great interest in a top national league.
The “zero hour
On 16 January 1932, a commission under Jean Bernard-Lévy, set up 12 months earlier by the FFF specifically for this purpose, decided on the final arrangements for future professional football in France. Among other things, a professional players’ statute was adopted under which players could be remunerated with a maximum of 2,000 old francs per month. In addition, two supervisory bodies were set up: One was responsible for player and contract issues and was headed by the former national player and journalist Gabriel Hanot. The second (Groupement des Clubs Professionnels), under Emmanuel Gambardella, who later became president of the association (in 1949), dealt with league operations and the championship; several club representatives were also entitled to vote in it.
Systematic promotion of young talent
In the second half of the 1970s, an even more intensive system of talent promotion was introduced, obliging all professional clubs to set up a sports boarding school (Centre de Formation, CdF). Although this requires a high level of investment, it also enables the less financially strong clubs to continue to build good, young players into their own ranks and to generate significant income from their transfers to clubs at home and abroad. Occasionally, even clubs returning to the amateur arena retain their CdF (such as AS Cannes in 2004), because the existence of such an institution may well be attractive to talented youngsters even in a third or fourth division club. Certainly, not every club can afford a facility like Girondins Bordeaux, which has its boarding school in “Château Bel Air”, a 1746-built castle with extensive training grounds in Le Haillan, but many clubs employ highly qualified staff for the junior field, often also former professionals: at Bordeaux, for example, Gernot Rohr headed their training centre for many years. The teams of the oldest youth class take part in the French youth championship (Coupe Gambardella).
Since the 2002/03 season, the FFF has been using a differentiated points system (“Classement des centres de formation”) to evaluate this youth work every year and to award the best three clubs. The previous winners were AJ Auxerre (2003), Montpellier HSC (2004, 2005), Stade Rennes (six times in a row from 2006 to 2011) and FC Sochaux (2012).
FIFA also rates these investments highly: per player and year it calculates their costs at 90,000 euros (for a 16 to 18-year-old); for each training year before the 16th birthday an additional 10,000 euros are added to any transfer value. In return for this training, not only in football but also in school, French graduates are obliged to sign their first professional contract with the training club for a maximum of three years. This rule is sometimes circumvented by young players signing a contract with a foreign club, often in response to pressure from their advisers who are interested in economic matters. But this is the exception: from 1998 to 2006, this involved 17 cases, the best known of which were Mickaël Silvestre (from Rennes to Inter Milan), Guy Demel (from Nîmes to Arsenal) and Mathieu Flamini (from Marseille to Arsenal as well).
The fact that boarding schools are equally worthwhile for clubs and young players can be demonstrated by the 2007/08 season: of the total of 518 footballers in the 20 Ligue 1 squads, 173 (corresponding to 33.4 %) are under contract with the club from whose Centre de Formation they come, i.e. on average nine “own plants” in a squad of 26 players. It is not uncommon for these to be lent out to a second or third divisional player for an initial period of one year when they reach the age of majority in order to gain playing experience; however, a significant proportion is then retrieved from the home club and incorporated into their own first division squad.
This is not only the case for clubs that are among the weaker ones in terms of sport or finances – Bordeaux, Lille and Rennes are even well above the league average with a share of over 40%. The front runners are FC Metz and AS Nancy, almost half of whose pros played for these clubs before they reached the age of majority, while the previous year’s pros Lorient and Valenciennes (11% and 12% respectively) and Marseille and Paris (around 20%) have very few players from their own boarding schools.
In the 2008/09 season, Le Havre AC has catapulted itself to the top of the league in this respect: 16 players, corresponding to two thirds of its squad, come from its own promotion of young talent; in addition there are eight other footballers trained in Le Havre who are under contract with league competitors. Nancy, Lille, Monaco and Bordeaux also rely on a double-digit number of their own plants. The worst performers are Nice, Lorient (4 each), Marseille (3) and Valenciennes (1).
The French football federation itself also runs such “talent factories” in the various regions of the country, which cooperate closely with the respective club boarding schools, and in Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines near Paris the INF (Institut national de formation), which is dedicated in particular to the training of youth coaches, and the Centre technique national Fernand-Sastre.
In addition, all professional clubs must have a second team for junior players (Reserve Pro or Équipe B). These reserve teams take part in the amateur leagues, so they cannot be promoted higher than the fourth class CFA. In the 2007/08 season, 22 reserve teams played in the four seasons of this highest amateur league, whereas in 2013/14 there will only be nine, eight of them B teams from first division clubs.
Experts largely agree that these measures in particular have contributed significantly to the permanent establishment of French football at the top of the European league – in addition to the fact that the league was already a preferred destination for immigrants from the French-speaking world at an early stage.
The French league as a magnet for foreign players
The clear separation between paid and amateur football, which began in 1932, led to players from many European countries legally pursuing their sport in France as early as the 1930s against payment, in particular from the British Isles, Austria and Hungary, but also individual Germans such as Willibald Kreß, who had been banned by the DFB for the 1932/33 season because of alleged professionalism, and Oskar Rohr. In individual cases, this was also favoured by political developments in the German-speaking countries; some players, especially after the Anschluss of Austria, became French citizens and then played for the French national football team (e.g. Rudolf “Rodolphe” Hiden or Gustav “Auguste” Jordan). In this way, the clubs were also able to avoid the initial rule that no more than four foreigners were allowed to play per team.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) attracted many players of Catalan and Basque origin to clubs in southern France. In addition, many immigrants from Italy and Poland, who were mainly active in mining in northern France, or their sons and grandchildren, have made a name for themselves in Ligue 1, with Roger Piantoni, Michel Platini, Raymond Kopaczewski and Léon Glovacki from the early years. Also players from the French overseas possessions and the former colonies of the Grande Nation increasingly shaped the league (from Larbi Ben Barek to Marius Trésor to Zinédine Zidane). All their history is a “reduced and delayed image of the French immigration of the 20th century”.