Ligue 1 Trivia
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48 free Ligue 1 trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ligue 1 trivia for French football fans, fantasy managers and anyone who can name more than one club besides Paris Saint-Germain. The quiz opens with the origins: professionalism voted in by the FFF in 1930, the inaugural 1932-33 'National' season, the disqualified Antibes side, Olympique Lillois lifting the first title, and the wartime championships that the league does not recognise. Then it moves through the dynasties: Stade de Reims and Just Fontaine, the Saint-Étienne of the 1960s and 70s, Bordeaux under Aimé Jacquet, Bernard Tapie's Marseille winning Europe in 1993 and being relegated for match-fixing, Lyon's seven straight titles, four different champions in four years, and PSG's Qatar Sports Investments era with Ibrahimović, Neymar and Mbappé. Later rounds cover the records of Delio Onnis, Josip Skoblar and Mickaël Landreau, the Hexagoal trophy, the Parc des Princes and Stade Vélodrome, the DNCG, sponsorship names from Orange to McDonald's, and the shrink to 18 clubs in 2023. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Paris Saint-Germain, Champions League and French football quizzes.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ligue 1 cut to 18 clubs in 2023, matching which other major league?
Bundesliga
Bundesliga: Germany's top flight also runs with 18 clubs. Ligue 1 got there by relegating four sides and promoting only two at the end of the 2022-23 season.
Q 02What was Ligue 1 called before its 2002 rebrand?
Division 1
Division 1: the 2002 rebrand to Ligue 1 came as the league grew from 18 clubs to 20, a size it then kept for 21 seasons.
Q 03Which club plays its home games at the Stade Bollaert-Delelis?
Lens
Lens: the Stade Bollaert-Delelis seats about 38,000, more than the town has residents, and half its name honours a director of the local mining company.
Q 04Marseille-born Zinedine Zidane never played for OM; from which French club did he join Juventus in 1996?
Bordeaux
Bordeaux: Zidane spent four seasons there after starting out at Cannes, and reached the 1996 UEFA Cup final just before his move to Italy.
Q 05Which club won the 2020-21 Ligue 1 title by a single point, its first championship in ten years?
Lille
Lille finished one point clear of Paris for their first title since 2011, and coach Christophe Galtier stepped down only days after lifting the trophy.
Q 06Which club won France's first professional league title in 1933?
Olympique Lillois
Olympique Lillois won a one-off final 4-3 against Cannes, who were only there because the other group's winners had been thrown out over a bribery scandal.
Q 07Guy Roux spent four decades taking which small-town club from regional football to the French title in 1996?
Auxerre
Auxerre: Roux took over as player-manager in 1961, when the club played in a regional division, and its 1996 championship is still its only one.
Q 08Which club was the first to win the French league title twice, in the years before the Second World War?
Sochaux
Sochaux: carmaker Peugeot's club had staged its own cup for France's top sides before the league existed, then won the title in 1935 and again in 1938.
Q 09How do France's football authorities treat the 'war championships' played from 1939 to 1945?
Not recognised at all
Not recognised at all: professionalism was abolished under Vichy and clubs played in regional northern and southern zones, so those wins appear on no club's list of titles.
Q 10Which French club dominated the 1950s and reached two European Cup finals?
Stade de Reims
Stade de Reims lost both finals to Real Madrid: after the first, in 1956, playmaker Raymond Kopa joined the Spanish club and faced his old side in the second, in 1959.
Q 11Which two clubs dominated French football from the 1960s to the early 1980s?
Saint-Étienne and Nantes
Saint-Étienne and Nantes shared 15 of the 20 titles from 1964 to 1983, yet Saint-Étienne's tenth, in 1981, is still the club's last.
Q 12Which manager made Bordeaux the main force of the mid-to-late 1980s?
Aimé Jacquet
Aimé Jacquet won three league titles at Bordeaux before the club's president sacked him in 1989; nine years later he coached France to the World Cup.
Q 13Which Ballon d'Or-winning striker led the Marseille side that won four straight titles from 1988-89?
Jean-Pierre Papin
Q 21Which club went 32 league matches unbeaten within one season, a French record, and lost just once in 1994-95?
Nantes
Nantes lost only one of 38 games that season; the longest unbeaten run of all, 36 matches, belongs to Paris, who needed parts of two seasons to build it.
Q 22Which Brazilian star spent two seasons in Ligue 1 before joining Barcelona in 2003?
Ronaldinho
Ronaldinho moved from Grêmio to Paris at 20, won the 2002 World Cup with Brazil while playing in France, and left for Barcelona a year later.
Q 23Who is Ligue 1's all-time top scorer with 299 goals?
Delio Onnis
Delio Onnis stayed with his club when it was relegated in 1976, topped the second-division scoring chart on the way back up, and won the league title a year later.
Jean-Pierre Papin was the league's top scorer five seasons running, then lost the 1993 Champions League final to his old club after joining AC Milan.
Q 14Which businessman became Marseille president in 1986 and built the side that won Europe in 1993?
Bernard Tapie
Bernard Tapie had already won the Tour de France as a team owner: his La Vie Claire riders Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond took the race in 1985 and 1986.
Q 15The 1993 match-fixing scandal that cost Marseille their title involved which opponent?
Valenciennes
Valenciennes: two of its players took money to go easy six days before Marseille's Champions League final, but teammate Jacques Glassmann refused and went public.
Q 16Which club won seven consecutive French league titles from 2002 to 2008?
Lyon
Lyon had never been champions of France before 2002, and those seven straight titles are still the only ones the club has won.
Q 17Which club won the 2011-12 Ligue 1 title, the last of four different champions in four seasons?
Montpellier
Montpellier's only title came three years after promotion, with Olivier Giroud scoring 21 league goals in his last season before he left for Arsenal.
Q 18Which investor group bought Paris Saint-Germain in 2011?
Qatar Sports Investments
Qatar Sports Investments took a majority stake in 2011; a club that had been champions only twice then won seven of the eight league titles from 2013 to 2020.
Q 19Which club is the only one never to have been relegated from Ligue 1 on points?
Paris Saint-Germain
Paris Saint-Germain, founded only in 1970, came up in 1974 and have stayed ever since; their one drop, in 1972, was an administrative one after the split from Paris FC.
Q 20Which three founding members of the French league were playing in Ligue 1 in the 2026-27 season?
Marseille, Nice and Rennes
Marseille, Nice and Rennes were the last of the twenty 1932 founders left in the 2026-27 top flight, after fellow founder Metz was relegated in May 2026.
Q 24Whose 44 goals in 1970-71 remain the record for a single Ligue 1 season?
Josip Skoblar
Josip Skoblar's 44 goals for Marseille also won him Europe's Golden Shoe, in between the two seasons when the prize went to Gerd Müller.
Q 25Which goalkeeper holds the record for Ligue 1 appearances with 618?
Mickaël Landreau
Mickaël Landreau saved a penalty on his debut at 17, against Bastia in 1996, and played the last of his 618 games for that same club 18 years later.
Q 26Kylian Mbappé won his first Ligue 1 title with which club in 2016-17?
Monaco
Monaco: an 18-year-old Mbappé helped the club score 107 league goals and win its first title in 17 years, then left for Paris that summer.
Q 27Kylian Mbappé, six times Ligue 1's top scorer, left in 2024 for which club?
Real Madrid
Real Madrid got him without paying a fee once his contract in Paris ran out; he had also been voted the French league's best player a record five times.
Q 28Which player left Barcelona for Paris in 2017 for a world-record €222 million?
Neymar
Neymar: no fee was negotiated at all, because the French club simply paid the €222 million release clause written into his Barcelona contract.
Q 29Which striker won four straight Ligue 1 titles from 2013 and left France as his club's record goalscorer?
Zlatan Ibrahimović
Zlatan Ibrahimović won the league in each of his four seasons in Paris; in his last home game the crowd rose in the 10th minute to applaud their number 10.
Q 30What is the PSG-Marseille fixture known as?
Le Classique
Le Classique is a young rivalry: it took off only in the late 1980s, and was talked up by Marseille's president and the television company that bought the Paris club in 1991.