The Worst Ligue 1 Teams Ever

Last Updated: May 2026

The Worst Ligue 1 Teams Ever – Toulouse, Montpellier, Angers

Three Ligue 1 relegations. Three completely different kinds of disaster. Toulouse were condemned by a pandemic and a court ruling in 2019-20, holding the all-time Ligue 1 record for fewest points in a season: 13, from 28 curtailed games. Montpellier — champions of France just thirteen years earlier — conceded 79 goals in 34 games in 2024-25 and watched part of their own stadium catch fire. Angers in 2022-23 appointed a manager whose “management by terror” reputation had been publicly documented before he ever took the job. These are the worst seasons in recent Ligue 1 history, and no two of them look anything alike.

Three Different Kinds of Failure

The worst seasons in any league tend to follow a recognisable pattern: a squad promoted beyond its means, a manager sacked too late, a run of results that becomes unstoppable. What makes the three Ligue 1 cases in this documentary unusual is how differently each one unravelled, and what each tells us about the specific pressures that can destroy a French top-flight club.

Toulouse’s 2019-20 collapse is the only Ligue 1 relegation in history to have been suspended by a court, confirmed by vote, and carried out without the relegated club being given the chance to save themselves on the pitch.

Montpellier’s 2024-25 season was a slower collapse with a more human texture — a family club crushed by a structural broadcasting crisis, a captain who could not conceal his indifference, and a ground that literally caught fire.

Angers in 2022-23 appointed a manager whose conduct had been documented in the national press, then watched him confirm every fear in sixty-one days.

Toulouse 2019-20: Relegated by a Pandemic and a Court Ruling

Toulouse is a rugby city. France’s fourth largest, with a population of around 1.4 million, it sits at the heart of the Occitanie region and has historically generated far more rugby passion than football fervour. The Stadium de Toulouse was already known for some of the lowest average attendances in Ligue 1 before the 2019-20 season began. In this context, Toulouse’s football club operated under permanently modest expectations. Supporters of Les Violets rarely demanded much more than survival, and in the opening months of 2019-20, even that was looking precarious.

The Managerial Merry-Go-Round

By October 2019, Toulouse were already deep in the relegation zone, and manager Alain Casanova was replaced by Antoine Kombouare — a former PSG manager with a reputation for stabilising struggling clubs. His first game produced a win against Lille. His next ten produced a run of successive defeats. He was dismissed on 6 January 2020, following a 1-0 Coupe de France loss to fourth-division Saint-Pryvé Saint-Hilaire, having lost ten matches in a row. Denis Zanko inherited the wreckage.

By March 2020, Toulouse were rooted to the bottom of the table with 13 points from 28 games: 3 wins, 4 draws, 21 defeats. They had taken one point from their final 18 matches. Three managers. No coherent plan. With memories still fresh of their survival fight three years earlier, some at the club clung to the idea of a springtime recovery. What arrived instead was something no club in French football history had navigated before.

Covid Ends the Season — and Toulouse With It

On 30 April 2020, the Ligue de Football Professionnel ended the 2019-20 season. The French government had announced that professional sport could not resume until September, and UEFA had asked national federations to wrap up by 3 August at the latest. With ten games still to play and 30 points still theoretically available, the LFP froze the table using a points-per-game calculation. Toulouse finished 20th. Amiens finished 19th. Both were relegated.

The sporting argument was hard to ignore: Toulouse had been bottom throughout. But the legal argument was powerful. The relegation was being imposed before the competition had run its course, in violation, the clubs argued, of how relegation was supposed to work under the rules as written. You do not, as the clubs’ lawyer put it to the press, declare a team that is losing at the 66th minute the loser before the final whistle.

The Conseil d’Etat Ruling: A Victory That Changed Nothing

Toulouse and Amiens took their case to the Conseil d’Etat — France’s supreme administrative court. On 9 June 2020, the court suspended both relegations and ordered the LFP and the Federation Francaise de Football to review the format of Ligue 1 for the upcoming season, to be completed by 30 June. The court found that the LFP’s decision to relegate the bottom two clubs was not a necessary consequence of the frozen classification under the existing rules. The clubs had legitimate grounds. Their relegation had been unlawful as imposed.

The reprieve lasted fourteen days. On 23 June, the ruling was overturned, the clubs voted to maintain a 20-team Ligue 1, and Toulouse were administratively relegated to Ligue 2. Thirteen points, ten games unplayed, and a lingering sense of injustice that the highest court in France had formally acknowledged. It remains the only Ligue 1 relegation in history to have been suspended by a court, confirmed by vote, and carried out without the relegated club being given the chance to save themselves on the pitch.

Toulouse’s 13 points from 28 games in 2019-20 is the lowest points total in Ligue 1 history in the three-points-for-a-win era, according to StatMuse. No club in French top-flight football has ever finished a season with fewer.

Montpellier 2024-25: The Champions’ Collapse

Montpellier won the Ligue 1 title in 2011-12. They did it with the 13th-largest budget in the division, beating PSG to the championship by three points in one of the most unexpected title victories in the league’s modern history. By the time the 2024-25 season began — their 106th in club history, and their 50th-anniversary season as Montpellier HSC — that triumph felt like a different era entirely. Montpellier were relegated on 26 April 2025 with 16 points from 34 games: 4 wins, 4 draws, 26 defeats, 79 goals conceded, and 1 clean sheet. Sixteen consecutive seasons in Ligue 1, ended with a whimper.

The Budget Crisis and the Broadcasting Black Hole

As a family-run club owned by Laurent Nicollin, son of the legendary founding president Louis Nicollin, Montpellier had always operated with one of the tighter budgets in Ligue 1. Their 2023-24 budget stood at around 52 million euros, modest by top-flight standards and dependent, as it had always been, on selling players to stay solvent. What made 2024-25 different was the scale of the external shock hitting the entire league.

Ligue 1’s 2024-29 broadcasting deal with DAZN and beIN Sports generated approximately 47% less gross income for French football than the prior cycle, with net income for clubs falling from around 495 million euros to approximately 190 million euros across the league. For a club operating on Montpellier’s budget, the shortfall in expected broadcast revenue reached approximately 20 million euros. Against a total budget of 52 million euros, that figure was not a problem to manage around — it was a crisis.

Laurent Nicollin knew he would need to sell. He had been hoping Musa Al-Taamari, a Jordanian winger the French press had dubbed “the Jordanian Messi,” might attract significant interest and fund a rebuild. Al-Taamari stayed. So did others who might have raised funds. The squad that began the 2024-25 season was, in effect, the one that had just avoided relegation, minus the budget to improve it, and minus the belief that survival was guaranteed.

Der Zakarian to Gasset: From Sacking to Has-Been

Michel Der Zakarian held on into the autumn, but a 5-0 home defeat to Marseille in October 2024 left Montpellier bottom of the table and confirmed his departure. His replacement was Jean-Louis Gasset, appointed on 22 October 2024. At 70 years old, Gasset brought a depth of experience that few coaches at any level could match. He was born in Montpellier; his father Bernard Gasset had co-founded the club alongside Louis Nicollin, making this a homecoming as much as an appointment. As a player he had given a decade to Montpellier; as assistant manager he had spent nine years alongside Laurent Blanc at Bordeaux, the France national team, and PSG between 2007 and 2016, winning three consecutive Ligue 1 titles at the Parc des Princes.

But Gasset had announced his retirement at the end of the prior season, following a stint as interim manager at Marseille. He came out of retirement because the club needed him, and because Montpellier was not simply a job — it was the place his family had built. His own assessment during the season told a different story. “Maybe I’m a football has-been,” he said at one point. It was not a rallying cry. Gasset passed away on 26 December 2025, aged 72, before the full weight of his final season had been properly absorbed.

The Savanier Moment: 210,000 Euros a Month

In December 2024, Montpellier travelled to face Le Puy in the Coupe de France — a fourth-tier club. They lost. During the match, a Le Puy supporter confronted Téji Savanier, academy graduate, club captain, and the symbol of what Montpellier had been and might still be. “Last in Ligue 1 — does that hurt?” the fan asked. Savanier’s response became one of the most shared moments in French football that winter: “When you’re being paid 210,000 euros a month, no.”

The club stripped him of the captaincy. The fans stripped him of something harder to restore. The local boy who had come through the academy, who carried the hopes of a club that could no longer afford to dream, transformed in one sentence into the emblem of a squad that had stopped fighting.

The Stade de la Mosson Fire

In March 2025, Montpellier were at home to Saint-Étienne. Trailing 0-2, the ultras launched flares onto the pitch in protest at a season that had become unbearable to witness. Part of the East Stand, occupied by the club’s two main supporter groups, Butte Paillade 1991 and Armata Ultra 2002, caught fire. Smoke poured through the Stade de la Mosson, a ground that had hosted six games at the 1998 FIFA World Cup. The match was abandoned and awarded to Saint-Étienne by the LFP disciplinary commission. The stand burned. The team lost. In one image, the season was complete.

Gasset stepped down in April 2025. “It’s over,” he said. Zoumana Camara, who had spent six years as assistant to Laurent Blanc, Unai Emery, and Thomas Tuchel at PSG before coaching the club’s Under-19s, was appointed on 8 April 2025 to oversee what remained, which included another heavy defeat to Marseille. Relegation was confirmed on 26 April.

Montpellier’s 2024-25 season is the worst in the club’s Ligue 1 history and the joint fourth-lowest points total in the French top flight: 16 points from 34 games, 79 goals conceded, 1 clean sheet. Relegation was confirmed on 26 April 2025 (Ligue 1 official).

Angers 2022-23: The “Management by Terror” Appointment

Angers SCO spent eight consecutive seasons in Ligue 1 between 2015 and 2023, building a reputation as one of the division’s more organised and resilient sides. They were not glamorous. They did not produce headline signings or play expansive football. But they ground out results consistently enough to make Ligue 1 their permanent home, finishing as high as 9th in 2016-17 while operating on modest means. By the summer of 2022, that reputation was about to be tested by a series of avoidable decisions and, ultimately, by the appointment of a manager whose fitness for the role had been publicly questioned before he ever took the job.

Angers’ 28 defeats in 2022-23 is the most by any club in a single modern Ligue 1 season, according to StatMuse. Their 18 points from 38 games places them sixth-lowest in the league’s history.

The Summer the Squad Walked

Before the 2022-23 season began, Angers allowed a significant portion of their experienced squad to leave on free transfers when contracts expired. The club had delayed renewal discussions throughout the year, and by the time the summer window opened, several key players had departed for nothing. Fans were furious before a ball was kicked. A dark cloud had settled over the club before the season started, and it never lifted.

Baticle’s Formation Experiment

Coach Gérald Baticle was unable to settle on a formation for a squad that had lost depth and experience simultaneously. Angers made an adequate enough start, but a 3-0 home defeat to Marseille in October triggered a seven-match losing run. Baticle was suspended on 24 November 2022, and eventually sacked on 22 December during the break for the Qatar World Cup, with Abdel Bouhazama stepping in on an interim basis.

The Appointment Nobody Should Have Made

On 5 January 2023, Bouhazama was confirmed as Angers’ permanent head coach. The problem was not a shortage of information about who he was. During his time running Angers’ youth academy, Bouhazama had been publicly accused of humiliating, insulting, intimidating, and threatening young players in his care — conduct described as “management by terror” in an investigation published by Ouest-France. President Saïd Chabane had been aware of the complaints before the promotion. He promoted Bouhazama anyway.

It produced precisely what anyone who had read the Ouest-France investigation might have predicted. Six consecutive defeats. No improvement in confidence. Then, before a 5-0 defeat away at Montpellier on 5 March 2023, Bouhazama addressed his squad on the subject of a player who had been charged with sexual assault the previous month. His comments, in which he appeared to dismiss the severity of the charge, were leaked to L’Equipe and reported nationally. Bouhazama left the club on 7 March 2023, sixty-one days after his permanent appointment.

Dujeux, the Youth Policy, and the Long-Awaited Win

Former assistant Alexandre Dujeux was handed the task of managing what had become inevitable. He could not haul Angers off the bottom, but he earned genuine goodwill from supporters by giving academy players their chance in the final stretch, and he ended the club’s winless run — which had stretched from September to April — with a victory against Lille on 8 April 2023. The eight points Dujeux gathered from his twelve games in charge were enough to avoid a record-low tally.

Angers were relegated with five games remaining, returning to Ligue 2 with 18 points and 28 defeats. Three managers, one season, and a relegation that could have been avoided at several points along the way. The one element of the story that ends with any optimism: Dujeux was retained, guided Angers back to Ligue 1 at the first attempt, and the club are competing in the top flight in 2025-26.

What Separates These Three Disasters

Set against each other, the numbers reveal three very different shapes of failure.

What the table cannot capture is how the shape of each collapse differed. Toulouse’s low points total is partially a function of the curtailed season — had they played to 34 or 38 games, their total would almost certainly have been higher, though not necessarily high enough to survive. They were genuinely bottom, without question, but they were also denied the chance to prove otherwise.

Montpellier’s numbers tell the story of defensive catastrophe: 79 goals conceded from 34 games is 2.3 per match. One clean sheet across an entire season. A club that had no structural protection once the budget collapsed and confidence followed.

Angers, by contrast, scored more than either of the other two clubs despite losing more games than anyone in the modern Ligue 1 era. Their problem was not goals — it was the total disintegration of defensive organisation and collective belief, compounded by managerial chaos at every level of the club.

Three different causes. Three different shapes of failure. All three clubs ended up in Ligue 2.

Why Ligue 1 Keeps Producing These Disasters

The three clubs in this documentary are not outliers in French football. They are symptoms of structural pressures that the league has repeatedly failed to address.

The broadcasting crisis is the most acute recent factor. Ligue 1’s 2024-29 rights deal delivered 47% less gross income than the prior cycle. For larger clubs, the shortfall was painful but manageable. For clubs operating on budgets of 50 to 60 million euros, it was existential. Montpellier’s approximate 20-million-euro shortfall on a 52-million-euro budget is the clearest illustration of what that collapse looked like at club level, and they will not be the last club to face a version of that equation.

Beneath the broadcasting crisis sits a longer-term structural problem: French football’s family-run, community-rooted clubs — Montpellier, Angers, Toulouse — have been competing in a league whose financial architecture has increasingly favoured clubs with external investment or significant commercial infrastructure. The family clubs are running out of room. Montpellier won Ligue 1 with the 13th-largest budget in 2012. Repeating that in the current financial landscape is not impossible, but it requires a level of structural stability that a 47% broadcast revenue cut removes at a stroke.

The Angers story adds a third dimension that no amount of financial reform addresses: governance failure. Chabane’s decision to promote Bouhazama despite documented evidence of his conduct was not a failure of football intelligence — it was a failure of basic institutional accountability. A club that cannot protect its own academy players from the behaviour of a coach, and then promotes that coach to manage the first team, has a problem that no formation or transfer window can fix.