Ligue 1 Season Predictions 2023-24: Opta Predictions

Ligue 1 season predictions: quick hits

Title favorite: Paris Saint Germain
Champion, dark horse.: Lance.
The top four favorites:Paris Saint-Germain, Lens, Marseille and Lille.
Relegation favorites:Metz and Le Havre

We let the Opta supercomputer simulate the 2023-24 Ligue 1 season 10,000 times to see how it thinks the season might go.

It has very quickly integrated the new competition format, which will see 18 clubs competing in the 2023-24 season: down from 20 last season. Of the 18 Ligue 1 teams in this season's competition, Opta supercomputer pre-season simulations show that 14 of those clubs have won the title at least once, while 16 of them occupy the two automatic relegation places in the 10,000 simulations available at the end of the season.

Here, we take a look at all the key findings from the Opta supercomputer's 10,000 simulations of the 2023-24 Ligue 1 season.

Who will win the Ligue 1 title in the 2023-24 season?

In news that will surprise absolutely no one, the Opta supercomputer has seen Paris Saint-Germain win the Ligue 1 title for the 2023-24 season. They have won nine of the last 11 editions of the French top flight and finished runners-up in the other two (2016-17 and 2020-21).

In our 10,000 pre-season simulations, Paris Saint-Germain have a 55.5% probability of winning Ligue 1, as well as finishing in the top three, and therefore having an 88.3% chance of automatically advancing to the Champions League. While more than half of preseason simulations see PSG win the title, that percentage is much lower than the previous two seasons. Prior to the 2021-22 season they were 79.5% favorites to win the Ligue 1 title, while last season it was slightly lower at 76.0%, well above this season's 55.5%.

The biggest contenders for the blowout win over Paris Saint-Germain are Lens, who won the Ligue 1 title in our 21.6% pre-season simulation. Since finishing second in Ligue 2 and returning to the top flight in the 2019-20 season, they have finished in the top seven of Ligue 1 three times in a row, including an excellent second place last season. They finished the season just a point behind Paris Saint-Germain and will be playing in the Champions League for the first time since the 2002-03 season, but they will have to contend with the loss of a couple of key players such as Secco Fofana and Lois Openda.

Outside contenders include Marseille (6.3%) and Lille (6.2%), all other teams that have won the Ligue 1 title less than 500 times in our 10,000 preseason simulations. Brest and Lorient fans can dream, as they both won the title once in those simulations. You never know ......

Who will win the top three in Ligue 1?

With the expansion of the Champions League from 32 to 36 teams, Ligue 1 has been allocated another place in the new league phase, meaning the top three clubs will enjoy this new format for the 2023-24 season, while the fourth-placed team will go through to the third qualifying round.

Paris Saint-Germain shouldn't have too much to worry about, with the defending champions finishing in the top three in our Opta Supercomputer simulation at 88.31 TP3T and Lens favored to make it back-to-back top three finishes (67.71 TP3T). However, the battle for third place is even more exciting.

According to the Opta supercomputer, the teams most likely to fight for third place are Marseille (35.61 TP3T), Lille (33.01 TP3T), Rennes (29.11 TP3T) and Lyon (20.61 TP3T).

Marseille finished third in Ligue 1 last season, their third top-three finish in the last four years. Rennes have been one of the most consistent teams in the last four Ligue 1 seasons, finishing in the top six each time. They finished the 2022-23 season five points behind Marseille in the table.

One of the reasons Lille have finished in the top three in the Opta Supercomputer simulation for the 2023-24 season more often than Rennes is because of their strong underlying stats from last season. Of the teams that entered the top half of the Ligue 1 table at the end of the season, no team had a bigger negative difference (8.1) between their goal difference (+21) and expected goal difference (+29.1) than they did.

Who will be relegated from Ligue 1 in the 2023-24 season?

Our Opta supercomputer simulation doesn't give much hope for Le Havre or Metz, who are hoping to avoid relegation straight to Ligue 2 in their first season back in the top flight.

Le Havre are the favorites to be relegated, ranking in the relegation zone at 73.1% in the Opta Supercomputer simulation, with 46.6% at the bottom of the league. They are closely followed by Metz, who have the second highest probability of being relegated at 64.4% and the second highest frequency of finishing bottom (34.2%). However, on a positive note for both clubs, in the last 85 years of the French top flight, no newly promoted team has ever been relegated back to the second division in their first season.

The main battle is likely to be avoiding the relegation play-off, which will be played by the team that finished 16th in the 2023-24 season. Aside from Le Havre and Metz, Nantes is the next team at risk of relegation, with a 25.61 TP3T chance of automatic relegation and a 19.91 TP3T chance of finishing 16th.

Seven other clubs (Montpellier, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Reims, Clermont, Lorient and Brest) are known to the French as "le ventre mou"(Soft Tummies), they won't be particularly good or bad throughout the season. Depending on how these teams start the 2023-24 season, that could easily change.

How does the Opta supercomputer model work?

- Opta's league prediction model estimates the likelihood of a team finishing in each position in the competition. As a result, we can see how successful a team's season is likely to be, whether it's their chances of relegation or winning the title.

- The model estimates the probability of each game's outcome (win, draw or loss) by using betting market odds and Opta's power rankings. The odds and rankings are based on historical and recent team performance.

- The model uses these match result probabilities to take into account the strength of the opposition and simulates the remaining fixtures in the competition thousands of times. By analyzing the results of each simulation, the model can see how often a team finishes at the bottom of each league to make our final prediction.