The Most Successful Football Clubs In France

On the international stage and domestically, France have always been one of the super-powers of world football. It was Les Bleus who scored the very first World Cup goal. Stade de Reims meanwhile appeared in the inaugural European Cup final, an event held at the Parc des Princes, Paris.

Down the years too this is a nation that has gifted the planet some extraordinary footballers, from Just Fontaine to Raymond Kopa; Platini to Zidane.

When determining who are the five most successful clubs currently operating in Ligue 1 we must pre-date these superstars, to 1932, when the league structure in France turned professional.

During those nascent years we find that Lille dominated the Forties while Nice had their moments in the Fifties. Nantes came to the fore in the Sixties before Bordeaux enjoyed great success two decades later.

That none of these sides are included below is a testament to a trait the French hold dear, it being drafted into its constitution. For this is an egalitarian league bereft of a Bayern or Barcelona.

Illustrating this point, ten different French clubs have ultimately topped the top-flight on four or more occasions.

Olympique Lyonnais

Nantes run Lyon close but this mainstay of the French top-flight have to make the final cut for their emphatic domination of the 2000s.

Prior to that, Les Gones – ‘The Kids’ – enjoyed moderate success, nurturing a number of France internationals and winning the occasional Coupe de France across the first half a century of their existence.

That all changed in 1987 when a local, wealthy businessman named Jean-Michel Aulas acquired the club, first ridding them of paralysing debt and then changing Lyon’s whole ethos.

Despite having enormous funds at their disposal, they admirably eschewed the temptation to spend big on established superstars, instead concentrating on their scouting system and youth set-up. This they did to exceedingly good effect.

Over the next decade, Michael Essien, Florent Malouda, Juninho, and Karim Benzema became first-time regulars and in that period, Lyon won the league for seven years running, additionally reaching the last four of the Champions League.

AS Monaco

At the risk of insulting an entire principality, Monaco are such a strange club.

Once a decade they forge a fabulous team that goes on to win a title and a Coupe de France before seeing that collective break up for all manner of reasons, leading to another spell in the relative wilderness.

This has been going on since the early Sixties when they first emerged as a force to be reckoned with.

The perfect example concerning this is their brilliant 2016/17 side that won Ligue 1 by 12 clear points and reached the semi-finals of the Champions League.

It was a team bolstered by Tiemoue Bakayoko, who allowed Bernardo Silva, Joao Moutinho and Thomas Lemar to conjure up chaos. Up front there was Radamel Falcao partnered by a teenage Kylian Mbappe.

Twelve months later so many of these superb talents were gone, leaving Monaco a cash-rich husk in need of rebuilding. It is a pattern that persists across their history.

Saint Etienne

Les Verts were at their peak across the Sixties and Seventies, winning eight of their ten league titles in this golden period.

With a team locked down by Osvaldo Piazza and Christian Lopez in defence and illuminated by the enigmatic talents of Johnny Rep and Dominique Rocheteau, they didn’t only boss the France footballing landscape but made their mark on the continent, reaching the European Cup final in 1976.

Whether it’s the green kit, their name being adopted by an indie band, or the fact that Saint Etienne regularly appeared on British TV screens in an era when foreign sides largely remained mysterious entities, this is a club that has gained a cult status in modern times. That is small consolation for becoming a yo-yo side in the 21st century.

Olympique de Marseille

Les Phoceens have the history, no question about that. Indeed, they are the only club on this list to have won the league prior to every participant turning professional.

They are also the only French team to have won the European Cup/Champions League, doing so in 1993 and that just two years after losing as finalists.

Regrettably that era will now forever be associated with scandal, it later emerging that match-fixing and financial chicanery were part of the play-book of then-president Bernard Tapie.

That of course is to take nothing away from the sheer quality of personnel who lit up the south coast from the mid-Eighties to the early-Nineties.

There was Chris Waddle magnificent on the wing, feeding Jean-Pierre Papin, while Eric Cantona and Enzo Francescoli performed their magic. At the back, Marcel Desailly and Basile Boli were a study in impenetrability.

In addition to their ten league titles, Marseilles have also finished runner-up a record 14 times. Presently lying second to PSG with half of the current season played, the football betting is tipping history to repeat itself again.

Paris Saint-Germain

Founded in 1970 from the merger of Paris FC and Stade Saint-Germain, PSG won a league title in the Eighties and once again in the Nineties. There follows a fallow period up to 2013 whereupon Les Parisiens have topped the pile ten times in 11 seasons.

The reason for such sudden supremacy is clear and unequivocal, a takeover by Qatar Sports Investments in 2011 instantly garnering the club with untold riches, but it should be noted that PSG have had wealthy backers before.

In 1991 the television giant Canal+ wiped out the club’s huge debts and serviced a spending spree that brought George Weah to the French capital.

All of that pales though to their expenditure in recent years, with Neymar purchased for a world record fee of €222m in 2017 and Kylian Mbappe following soon after to the tune of €180m. In 2012 the arrival of Zlatan Ibrahimovic was a statement that PSG were now one of the major players in world football and seeing kids wearing their shirt on English high streets is a reflection of that.

A Champions League title however still eludes them despite being annually well fancied in the sports betting.