Paris St. Germain has won the French league title for the fifth consecutive season. Given their performance in the Champions League, however, their title win was relatively lackluster. There are reasons for this.
Anyone who saw Paris St. Germain in the Champions League semifinals against FC Bayern must find it almost strange that it took so long. While the champions in the other top European leagues—with the exception of the Premier League—have already been decided, in France it wasn’t until Wednesday night’s 2-0 win in the rescheduled top-of-the-table clash against closest rival RC Lens that mathematical certainty was achieved: With one matchday remaining, PSG is the French champion—for the fifth consecutive time.
This is now the club’s longest championship streak since PSG was taken over by the Qatari investment group QSI in 2011—and the second-longest in Ligue 1 history. PSG is still two championships short of matching Olympique Lyon’s record streak, which saw them triumph seven times in a row between 2002 and 2008.
PSG had already all but secured the title last weekend with a late 1-0 win over Brest. Ahead of the top-of-the-table clash in Lens—which had been postponed at the request of the northern French side—PSG held a six-point lead and boasted a significantly better goal difference. A true title showdown on Wednesday evening thus failed to materialize. After all, it was also thanks to Lens that Ligue 1 had anything resembling a title race this season.
Given their performances in the Champions League—where PSG could become only the second team in the competition’s history to defend their title—this is quite astonishing, especially since the most ambitious domestic challengers from Marseille and Monaco both fell far short of their own expectations and thus also trailed behind PSG. Lens, on the other hand, had an outstanding fall and winter, racking up eleven wins in twelve games at one point, engaging in a neck-and-neck race with the overwhelming favorites for months, and even going into the winter break at the top of the table.
A season like a hangover after the party
But this also had to do with the fact that PSG was definitely suffering from a hangover after the party following their first Champions League victory. Due to the subsequent Club World Cup, in which the Parisians also reached the final, there were only four weeks between the lost final against Chelsea and the first competitive match of the new season. Little preparation time, but above all little recovery time for the star-studded squad, whose lack of mental freshness was evident in September and October. PSG struggled through the fall, managing only two wins in six games at one point.
Added to this were injuries to key players such as Ousmane Dembelé, Desiré Doué, and Achraf Hakimi, all of whom were sidelined for extended periods by the end of 2025. Goalkeeper Lucas Chevalier, who arrived from Lille as Gianluigi Donnarumma’s successor, struggled to cope with the pressure of the big club, faltered several times in the league, and was eventually sidelined permanently following an injury.
It wasn’t until the new year that the machine ran smoothly again. Although Lens briefly reclaimed the top of the table in mid-February, the valiant small-town team from the north was no longer a match for the world-class club from the capital, dropping too many points to truly challenge PSG. The fact that the French championship was decided later this year than in Germany, Italy, and Spain is likely a major success for Lens—and ultimately irrelevant to PSG. As long as they win that one game in Budapest on May 30.
