Ligue 1 2024/25 Season Review: PSG Without Mbappe, Dembele's Golden Boot and Marseille's Resurgence

Could PSG still dominate Ligue 1 without Kylian Mbappe? That was the only question anyone in French football actually cared about heading into 2024/25, and by matchday 34 the answer wasn't close: yes, comfortably. A 13th title, 84 points, 92 goals scored, a 30-match unbeaten run, wrapped up with six games still to play. What's more interesting than the result is how they did it — not by finding one replacement for Mbappe, but by stopping needing one at all.

What PSG were replacing

Mbappe's farewell season, 2023/24, had been exactly what you'd expect: a 12th title, 27 league goals, a fifth straight Golden Boot, and a departure to Real Madrid with 256 goals across seven years at the club behind him. PSG lost just one match all campaign. The reasonable expectation going into the following season was a messy transition, a team rebuilding its identity around a Mbappe-shaped hole. That's not what happened.

The system that made one superstar unnecessary

Luis Enrique built the 2024/25 season around pressing and multiple attacking outlets rather than a single focal point. Ousmane Dembele, playing a roaming, technically-a-false-nine role through the middle, led the line with 21 goals. Bradley Barcola, quick and direct from the left, added 14 and became one of the best young wide forwards in Europe in the process. Fabian Ruiz and Vitinha ran the midfield underneath them, and the whole structure conceded just 35 goals, the best defensive record in the league. A 30-match unbeaten run — the longest in a single Ligue 1 season ever — and a 10-game winning streak somewhere inside it. French coverage kept reaching for the word fluide. That's the right word. This PSG had a rhythm the chaotic final Mbappe years never quite found, because nothing had to bend around one individual anymore.

A Golden Boot nobody expected to share

Dembele and Marseille's Mason Greenwood finished level on 21 goals apiece — the first shared Ligue 1 top-scorer award in decades. Dembele's came inside the league's dominant team; Greenwood's came without anything like PSG's squad depth around him, which arguably makes his the more impressive tally. On loan from Manchester United before a permanent move, he produced the best season of his career — hold-up play, reliable finishing, real chemistry with Marseille's supporting cast, whatever else got said about him off the pitch. Jonathan David's 16 for Lille and Arnaud Kalimuendo's 17 for Rennes are worth noting too — French football's scoring talent looked more spread out this season than in the Mbappe-dominated years before it.

Marseille's best season in years

Second place, 65 points, 19 behind PSG — a gap that sounds comfortable but undersells how much better Marseille actually were this year. A 5-1 win over Montpellier drew 66,312 fans, the season's biggest crowd, which tells you something about the energy back around the club. Greenwood's goals, a more solid midfield, and the Velodrome turning into a genuine fortress again were the foundations. Whether they can close the gap further depends on two things: Greenwood sustaining this level, and fixing a defence that shipped 46 goals — too many for a side with real title ambitions.

Monaco stayed in the conversation

Third place, 61 points, Champions League qualification, and a 7-1 demolition of Nantes that was the most one-sided PSG-adjacent result of the season outside Nice's 8-0 win over Saint-Etienne. Monaco's squad, built on pace and technical quality through midfield, remains one of the most attractive to watch in France, and another season of Ligue 1 experience for a young group matters more than the table position alone suggests. The gap to PSG stays significant, but second place is realistically theirs to take if Marseille's jump this season turns out to be a one-off rather than a new baseline.

Saint-Etienne's repeat heartbreak

Saint-Etienne, Montpellier and Reims all went down. Saint-Etienne's low point was an 8-0 home defeat to Nice in September — brutal for a club with ten league titles in its history, and one that's now spent more of the last decade outside the top flight than in it. Montpellier's relegation ended a long unbroken run in Ligue 1. Reims went down through the promotion-relegation playoff.

A few numbers worth keeping

• PSG's 30-match unbeaten run is the longest across a single Ligue 1 season in the competition's history.
• Dembele and Greenwood's shared Golden Boot, both on 21, is the first tie for the award since the 1990s.
• Nice's 8-0 win over Saint-Etienne on 20 September 2024 was the season's biggest margin of victory and one of the largest in the modern era.
• PSG scored 92 goals in 34 matches — 2.7 per game, without Mbappe anywhere in the squad.
• Bradley Barcola became the first player born in 2002 or later to reach 14 Ligue 1 goals in a season.
• Monaco's December win over Nantes moved them into third place, and they never left it for the rest of the campaign.

What actually happened the following season

PSG won a 14th title, their fifth in a row, sealed on 13 May 2026 with a 2-0 win over Lens — and added the Champions League on top, beating Arsenal in the final. Esteban Lepaul of Rennes took the Golden Boot with 21 goals. Lens, Lille and Lyon joined PSG in the Champions League places; Nantes and Metz went down. Full detail in the 2025/26 Ligue 1 Season Review.

If French football has you hooked

FootballDream doesn't run a Ligue 1-specific fantasy game, but the tactical instincts that made PSG's post-Mbappe system interesting translate directly to our Premier League games — a weekly Fantasy XI at /teams, match-result calls in the Predictor at /predictor, daily footballer-guessing in FootballQuest at /footballquest, the multi-competition Quiz at /quiz, or season-long Player Draft and Team Draft against friends. All free, no entry fee.