French Women’s Championship To Be Decided By Play-Offs From 2024

The French Division 1 Féminine, ranked by UEFA as the best women’s top-flight league in Europe, is to decided by a play-off system from the 2023/24 season as part of an overhaul of women’s soccer in France, home of current European champions Olympique Lyonnais.

Following the launch of the “Women’s Football Development Plan” chaired by Philippe Diallo, the interim President of the Fédération Française de Football (FFF) and Jean-Michel Aulas, a member of the FFF Executive Committee and President of current women’s champions, Olympique Lyonnais, a wide-ranging set of proposals to improve the game in France was set out to the media.

Under the new format, the top four teams in the league standings will meet in two semi-finals to be played on May 12, 2024, with the title of French champions to be decided in a one-off final the following weekend. The two finalists plus the winner of a third-place play-off between the two losing semi-finalists will represent France in the following season’s UEFA Women’s Champions League.

Founded in 1974 with funding from the FFF after overturning their own 47-year prohibition on women’s soccer. The league has existed in its current home-and-away format since 1992. In the 2023/24 season, the league will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Professionalism was introduced into the league during the 2009/10 season which coincided with the emergence of Olympique Lyonnais as the dominant force in the country. Funded by club owner, Aulas, they recruited the best players in the world, winning fifteen of the last sixteen French championships, including fourteen in succession between 2007 and 2020, ceding only to long-time rivals, Paris Saint-Germain in 2021.

While average attendances in the English (6,961) and German (2,461) leagues have spiked this season, aided by showpiece matches in their larger club stadiums, average crowds in France remain well below 1,000. This season’s biggest match between the last two champions, Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain attracted just 13,400 to the 59,186-capacity Groupama Stadium, less than a third of the highest attendance of 47,367 in England.

This season, there will be no French team in the semi-finals for the UEFA Women’s Champions League for the first time in almost a decade. Last month, eight-time European champions, Lyon, and two-time finalists, Paris Saint-Germain, were both eliminated at the quarer-final stage by Chelsea and VfL Wolfsburg respectively.

Speaking ahead of the second leg of their tie against Chelsea, Lyon head coach Sonia Bompastor admitted that the French league – for so many years the benchmark for European women’s soccer – has been superceded by the English Barclays Women’s Super League, riding on the crest of the wave created by hosting the UEFA Women’s Euro last summer.

“Since the 2019 World Cup in France, I think we haven’t been able to take the right turn. England knew how to surf its Euro. But there has been an awareness in France, things are moving. There is all the potential in France to be able to move in the right direction to catch up on this delay. England was inspired by what was done in France.”

Last week, France failed in their bid to host the UEFA Women’s Euro in 2025 which was awarded to neighbouring country, Switzerland. The French, hosts of the 2019 Women’s World Cup and next year’s Olympic Football tournament, received only one out of thirteen votes from the UEFA Executive Committee and was eliminated in the first round of voting.

Also included in today’s announcement, the FFF promised to increase funding of the women’s game by 20-25% and is inviting tenders to broadcast the league, Trophée des championnes (Champions Trophy) and the French national team over a four-year period from 2023-2027. As part of any new agreement, ten league matches will be broadcast for free without encryption.

In addition training centers will be created within clubs to aid the development of female players. Aulas emphasized that “the specifications are extremely strict, they correspond to the minimum standards for male structures. When you have the license that allows you to be approved as a training center, the reserve team will be able to play in the third division. We made a call for applications and there are already six”