Paris Saint-Germain play for three domestic trophies in a normal season: Ligue 1, the Coupe de France and the Trophée des Champions. For a quarter of a century there was a fourth, and PSG were better at it than anybody else in France. The Coupe de la Ligue — the French League Cup — no longer exists. It was abolished by the very body that ran it, which means the nine titles sitting in the Parc des Princes trophy cabinet are frozen there permanently. Nobody can ever catch them.
What the Coupe de la Ligue was
The Coupe de la Ligue was French football’s secondary knockout competition, organised by the Ligue de Football Professionnel — the same governing body that runs Ligue 1 and Ligue 2. In the form most supporters remember it, it launched in the 1994/95 season and ran, uninterrupted, until 2020.
The crucial detail is who was allowed in. Entry was restricted to France’s professional clubs, which is the single biggest difference between it and the Coupe de France. The Coupe de France is famously open to everybody, which is how an amateur side from the depths of the pyramid occasionally ends up drawn at home to the champions of France. The Coupe de la Ligue had no romance of that kind built into it. It was a competition between pros, for pros, and it never pretended otherwise.
How the competition worked
It was a straight single-leg knockout from start to finish. No replays, no two-legged ties until the very late rounds in some seasons, no second chances: level after 90 minutes meant extra time, and level after that meant penalties. Ligue 1 clubs involved in European competition entered at a later stage, which kept the early rounds as a Ligue 2 and lower-tier professional affair before the heavyweights arrived.
The final was the showpiece, played at the Stade de France in front of a genuinely large crowd, and the prize was more than silverware. For most of the competition’s life the winner earned a place in European competition — latterly the Europa League — which made it the shortest possible route into Europe for a club with no realistic hope of finishing in the top five. Win six games and you were in. That was the argument for keeping it.
Why French football scrapped it
The argument against it won. In September 2019 the LFP voted to abolish the Coupe de la Ligue, with the 2019/20 edition confirmed as the last. The reasoning was the reasoning you hear every time a competition is culled: the calendar was overloaded, midweek ties in midwinter were playing to half-empty stadiums, and the biggest clubs had long since started treating it as a reserve-team exercise until the semi-finals arrived.
There was a structural point underneath it too. France had two domestic cups in a country whose top flight had lost European coefficient ground, and one of them was visibly the junior partner. England kept its League Cup; France decided it could not justify the fixtures. Whatever you think of the decision, it was taken by the clubs themselves through the league, not imposed on them.
PSG’s record: nine titles and the last one ever
No club won the Coupe de la Ligue more often than Paris Saint-Germain. Their nine victories came in 1995, 1998 and 2008, and then in an extraordinary run through the Qatar Sports Investments era: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, five consecutive finals won, followed by a ninth in 2020.
That ninth is the one that matters historically. The final edition’s final could not be played on schedule because of the pandemic, so it eventually took place on 31 July 2020, with PSG beating Lyon on penalties after a goalless match. The Coupe de la Ligue therefore ended with Paris as its holders, and there is no mechanism by which that will ever change. It is the only major trophy in French football that PSG own outright and in perpetuity.
Compare that to the club’s other hauls. The Ligue 1 title count keeps moving, the Coupe de France record is still live, and the European record has been rewritten twice in the last two seasons. The Coupe de la Ligue tally is the only one that is finished.
The quadruple it made possible
The competition’s other legacy is a word that has quietly gone out of use at the Parc des Princes: the quadruplé domestique. With four domestic trophies on offer — Ligue 1, the Coupe de France, the Coupe de la Ligue and the Trophée des Champions — a clean sweep of French football meant winning all four in a single campaign.
PSG managed it in 2014/15, 2015/16, 2017/18 and 2019/20. It became the defining boast of that period: a squad so far ahead of its domestic rivals that it could win everything France had to offer and still be judged on what happened in Europe. Since 2020 the domestic clean sweep has meant three trophies rather than four, which is one reason the sides of the late 2010s and the sides of the 2020s are harder to compare than the raw trophy counts suggest.
Marquinhos is the last link to it. The captain joined PSG in 2013 and is the only member of the 2026/27 first-team squad who was at the club across those seasons; every other senior player arrived after the competition had already been consigned to history.
Is it ever coming back?
There is no serious sign of it. The pressure on the football calendar has increased rather than eased since 2019 — an expanded Champions League league phase, a revamped Club World Cup and the FIFA Intercontinental Cup have all added dates rather than removed them — and a competition that was scrapped for causing congestion is not an obvious candidate for revival in a more congested world.
For PSG, the practical effect is simple. Luis Enrique arrived in 2023, three years after the final whistle of the final edition, so no PSG manager since 2020 has been able to add to the record. Nine it was, and nine it stays.
