Ligue 1 goals per match: the clearest scoring rise among Europe's big leagues

Ligue 1 shrank in 2023-24, dropping from 20 clubs to 18 as part of a wider financial reorganisation of French football. A smaller top flight with fewer matches is exactly the kind of change that could plausibly move a league's scoring rate in either direction — fewer weak sides to pad a big club's goal difference, or a tighter, more competitive division with fewer easy points. We pulled the goals and matches for every Ligue 1 season since the three-points-for-a-win rule arrived in 1994-95, worked out the per-match rate ourselves, and checked what actually happened.

Two things stand out. First, Ligue 1 has the clearest sustained rise in scoring of any league in this series so far — not a flat line with one outlier season, but a real, steady climb. Second, the cut to 18 clubs hasn't reversed it.

The method

Every season's total goals and matches played were checked against that season's own official record and recomputed by hand. Ligue 1's club count has moved more than most of the leagues we've covered: 20 clubs through the mid-1990s, down to 18 for 1997-98 and 1998-99, back to 20 from 2002-03 (the same season Division 1 was renamed Ligue 1) through 2022-23, then down to 18 again from 2023-24 onward. One season, 2019-20, was curtailed by COVID-19 after 28 of 38 rounds and is excluded from the averages and the chart below — a partial season isn't comparable to a full one, though it's listed in the full data table for completeness.

Season by season

The full season-by-season data

A steady climb, not a single spike

The first half of this run and the second half tell a genuinely different story from what we found in Serie A or La Liga. The 16 full seasons from 1994-95 to 2009-10 averaged 2.33 goals per match; the 15 full seasons from 2010-11 to 2025-26 averaged 2.63 — a rise of three tenths of a goal per match, the clearest sustained trend among the leagues in this series so far. This isn't one outlier season dragging the average up: scoring climbed in most years from the mid-2000s trough onward, with only occasional small pullbacks along the way.

The 18-club cut hasn't reversed it

The three seasons immediately before the 2023-24 reduction to 18 clubs — 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 — averaged 2.79 goals per match. The three 18-club seasons since — 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26 — have averaged 2.83. If a smaller, theoretically more competitive top flight was going to tighten games up and suppress scoring, it hasn't shown up in the numbers yet: the rate has, if anything, ticked slightly higher since the cut, and 2024-25's 2.98 is the highest full-season figure in the entire 31-season data set.

The extremes of the series

• Highest: 2024-25, 2.98 goals per match (911 goals) — the highest in this data set, and under the newly reduced 18-club format.
• Lowest: 2005-06, 2.13 goals per match (811 goals) — the trough of a mid-2000s dip that also produced 2004-05's 2.17.
• Excluded as non-comparable: 2019-20, stopped after 28 of 38 rounds at 2.52 goals per match.

Where Ligue 1 sits against the other leagues we've studied

Ligue 1's 31-season average of 2.48 goals per match is the lowest of the leagues covered in this series so far — behind the Premier League's 2.69, and behind La Liga and Serie A's identical 2.66. That gap is driven almost entirely by Ligue 1's own low-scoring mid-2000s stretch; on recent-seasons form alone, the gap has mostly closed.

What this doesn't mean

A rising average doesn't identify a single cause, and three post-cut seasons isn't a large enough sample to call the 18-club era's effect on scoring settled — a run of low-scoring seasons could still bring the average back down. What the data shows, plainly, is that the reduction to 18 clubs did not coincide with the scoring collapse a smaller, tighter league might predict, at least not yet.