French Premier League 2011-12: Ligue 1 Schedule & Match Times

The Ligue 1, France’s primary football competition being the French professional league for association football clubs, is played by 20 teams on a promotion and relegation basis with Ligue 2.

The league seasons run from August to May, and each team plays 38 games out of a total of 380 matches in the season. Usually, the players take an extended break during the Christmas season, and return to football action in mid-January. Ligue 1 ranks fifth among European leagues, after the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, the German Bundesliga and the Italian Serie A.

To find out what time it will be in the capital city of your country, when the next match begins in the Ligue 1, take a look at the following table.

Important: To find the information more quickly, enter the name of your country in the search bar.

Teams are awarded three points for a win and one point for a draw, with zero points awarded for a loss. Team rankings are decided in turn by total points, followed by goal difference, and by goals scored. The club that has the most points at the end of each season becomes champion.

The three bottom-most teams on the points table get relegated to Ligue 2, in the following season, and the top three teams from Ligue 2 get promoted to Ligue 1.

Before 1995, the promotion and relegation format was different, with the bottom two teams getting directly relegated, while the third last team in Ligue 1 having to contest a play off with the winner of the second division play offs. The Dutch Eredivisie, and the German Fußball-Bundesliga also employ a similar system.

A “bonus rule” has been experimented with, in the Ligue 1, with an extra point awarded to a team scoring three or more goals. This experiment lasted from 1973 to 1976.

The idea was to encourage goal scoring and a more attacking approach. Though the experiment did not prove conclusively successful, a similar idea was tried in the 2006-07 season, in both Ligue 1 and Ligue 2. But the bonus in this case was monetary and not in the form of points added.

The teams for the current season are: Ajaccio, Auxerre, Bordeaux, Brest, Caen, Dijon, Evian, Lille, Lorient, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nancy, Nice, Paris Saint-Germain, Rennes, Saint-Étienne, Sochaux, Toulouse and Valenciennes.

The current champions are Lille, with Marseille finishing runners-up in the 2010-11 edition of the tournament.

Tags: France

Category: Football, La Liga, Match Time