Key takeaways
- Ligue 1 averaged 3.79 yellows and 0.249 reds per game across 309 matches in 2025/26, with over 3.5 cards landing 58.6 per cent of the time. That is a mid table European rate, a card a game short of Portugal.
- French referees let 6.0 fouls go for every card they show, the second most permissive of the five leagues where we hold the minute of every card. It is the one number that genuinely separates Ligue 1 from the rest of the big five.
- Five officials in last season's table are off the LFP list for 2026/27. They worked 77 of the 309 matches, 25 per cent of the season, and Stéphanie Frappart is among them: she retired in June 2026.
- Over 3.5 cards runs from 83.3 per cent with François Letexier to 33.3 per cent with Ruddy Buquet. As fair odds that is 1.20 against 3.00 on the same market.
- The same referees card differently in Europe. Letexier drops from 4.50 yellows a game in Ligue 1 to 3.65 in the Champions League, while Benoît Bastien rises from 3.35 to 4.17.
On this page
- The Ligue 1 card baseline for 2026/27
- Ligue 1 referee card stats: every official from 2025/26
- Five referees left and took a quarter of the season with them
- Letexier and Buquet are not the same bet
- Fouls per card, the number that makes Ligue 1 different
- The same referee cards differently in Europe
- Reds, penalties and the second half skew
- Turning a Ligue 1 referee rate into a priced bet
- What these Ligue 1 referee stats cannot tell you
Price a Ligue 1 card market off the league average and you are backing a number that almost nobody in the division actually produces. Ligue 1 referee card stats for 2026/27 start from 3.79 yellows per game, and the 19 officials who worked ten or more of its matches last season ranged from 2.89 to 4.69, a spread of 1.80 cards that moves the fair price on over 3.5 cards from 3.00 to 1.20. This page gives every referee who took a Ligue 1 match in 2025/26 a card rate, a red rate, a penalty rate, a half time split and a set of over rates, and it marks the five who are no longer on the LFP list. It is counted from 309 matches of event level records, which means we hold the minute of all 1,170 yellows and 77 reds rather than a season total, and we reconciled the league figures against our own nine league count before publishing a single row.
The Ligue 1 card baseline for 2026/27
Start with the division, because a referee number only means something measured against it. France is not a card heavy league by European standards, and that matters more than the rank itself: a low baseline means the official you draw moves the total by a larger share of it.
| League | Matches | Yellows per game | Reds per game | Booking points | Over 3.5 cards | Both teams booked | Fouls per card |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primeira Liga (POR) | 307 | 4.98 | 0.244 | 55.9 | 72.6% | 87.0% | 5.3 |
| La Liga (ESP) | 380 | 4.43 | 0.276 | 51.2 | 64.2% | 83.9% | 5.3 |
| Bundesliga (GER) | 308 | 3.82 | 0.175 | 42.6 | 54.2% | 76.9% | 5.2 |
| Ligue 1 (FRA) | 309 | 3.79 | 0.249 | 44.1 | 58.6% | 79.0% | 6.0 |
| Eredivisie (NED) | 309 | 3.26 | 0.172 | 36.9 | 42.1% | 70.9% | 6.3 |
Three numbers are worth holding. 3.79 yellows per game, 58.6 per cent over 3.5 cards, and 44.1 booking points. Against Portugal that is more than a card per game fewer, and our cross league card table puts France in a narrow band with Germany, England and Italy once Spain and Portugal are stripped out.
The fouls per card column is the one most people skip, and in France it is the whole story. Ligue 1 referees allow 6.0 fouls for every card they show, behind only the Dutch. The CIES Football Observatory found the same pattern in February 2024, measuring 6.8 fouls per yellow in Ligue 1 against roughly 5 elsewhere in the big five, and read it as either a lower willingness to book or a readiness to whistle small fouls. Our denominator is all cards rather than yellows alone, which on the same basis puts France at 6.4 fouls per yellow against 5.5 in Germany: a narrower gap, the same direction, two years on and from a different source.
Ligue 1 referee card stats: every official from 2025/26
22 entities refereed at least one Ligue 1 match in 2025/26. Everything below is Ligue 1 work only: Champions League, Europa League and World Cup appearances are excluded rather than blended in, which matters for the half dozen French officials who also work European nights.
| Referee | Matches | Yellows per game | Reds per game | Booking points | Over 3.5 cards | Fouls per game | Cards after half time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bastien Dechepy | 16 | 4.69 | 0.312 | 54.7 | 81.2% | 25.8 | 65.0% |
| François Letexier | 18 | 4.50 | 0.333 | 53.3 | 83.3% | 24.1 | 70.1% |
| Romain Lissorgue | 10 | 4.50 | 0.200 | 50.0 | 50.0% | 25.8 | 68.1% |
| Mathieu Vernice | 15 | 4.47 | 0.267 | 51.3 | 60.0% | 27.5 | 63.4% |
| Marc Bollengier | 17 | 4.35 | 0.294 | 50.9 | 70.6% | 26.9 | 69.6% |
| Jérôme Brisard | 16 | 4.31 | 0.438 | 54.1 | 68.8% | 23.1 | 67.1% |
| Jeremie Pignard | 17 | 4.24 | 0.412 | 52.6 | 58.8% | 23.4 | 45.6% |
| Stephanie Frappart | 13 | 4.00 | 0.000 | 40.0 | 61.5% | 24.3 | 61.5% |
| H Ben El Hadj Salem † | 7 | 4.00 | 0.429 | 50.7 | 57.1% | 22.9 | 64.5% |
| Jeremy Stinat | 14 | 3.93 | 0.500 | 51.8 | 71.4% | 22.9 | 64.5% |
| Abdelatif Kherradji | 11 | 3.91 | 0.364 | 48.2 | 72.7% | 28.4 | 51.1% |
| Thomas Leonard | 17 | 3.88 | 0.176 | 43.2 | 64.7% | 24.3 | 68.1% |
| Guillaume Paradis | 16 | 3.88 | 0.125 | 41.9 | 62.5% | 24.6 | 70.3% |
| Benoît Millot | 15 | 3.40 | 0.067 | 35.7 | 53.3% | 26.3 | 65.4% |
| Benoît Bastien | 20 | 3.35 | 0.200 | 38.5 | 55.0% | 22.7 | 63.4% |
| Gael Angoula | 12 | 3.25 | 0.083 | 34.6 | 41.7% | 20.5 | 72.5% |
| Clement Turpin | 18 | 3.17 | 0.167 | 35.8 | 44.4% | 23.0 | 56.7% |
| Willy Delajod | 17 | 3.12 | 0.235 | 37.1 | 52.9% | 24.8 | 61.4% |
| Hakim Ben el Salem Hadj † | 4 | 3.00 | 0.500 | 42.5 | 50.0% | 23.2 | 50.0% |
| Eric Wattellier | 17 | 2.94 | 0.294 | 36.8 | 35.3% | 19.9 | 69.1% |
| Ruddy Buquet | 18 | 2.89 | 0.111 | 31.7 | 33.3% | 23.2 | 68.5% |
| M Leleu ‡ | 1 | 0.00 | 0.000 | 0.0 | 0.0% | 12.0 | n/a |
† The same official, Hakim Ben El Hadj Salem, under two source spellings: 11 matches at 3.64 yellows per game between them. We do not merge referee entities without confirming the exact raw strings, so the pair is flagged rather than quietly added up. ‡ One match, no cards, listed only so the count reconciles to 309.
Bastien Dechepy is the heaviest card rate in the division at 4.69 yellows per game over 16 matches, with François Letexier next at 4.50 across 18. At the other end Ruddy Buquet showed 2.89 over 18 and Eric Wattellier 2.94 over 17. Four referees, comparable workloads, nearly two cards a game between the extremes. Our Ligue 1 referee page carries the same figures with the home and away splits added.
Five referees left and took a quarter of the season with them
This is the part that quietly breaks a model built on last season's numbers. The LFP published its group of Fédéral 1 referees for 2026/27 on 31 July 2026, and five names with Ligue 1 matches last season are not on it.
| Referee | 2025/26 status | Matches | Yellows per game | Over 3.5 cards |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benoît Bastien | Off the 2026/27 list | 20 | 3.35 | 55.0% |
| Thomas Leonard | Off the 2026/27 list | 17 | 3.88 | 64.7% |
| Benoît Millot | Off the 2026/27 list | 15 | 3.40 | 53.3% |
| Stephanie Frappart | Off the 2026/27 list | 13 | 4.00 | 61.5% |
| Gael Angoula | Off the 2026/27 list | 12 | 3.25 | 41.7% |
| Geoffrey Kubler | On the 2026/27 list | 0 | no record | no record |
| Aurélien Petit | On the 2026/27 list | 0 | no record | no record |
| Azzedine Souifi | On the 2026/27 list | 0 | no record | no record |
| Departed total | 77 of 309 |
The headline departure is Stéphanie Frappart, the first woman to referee a Ligue 1 match, who retired at the end of the 2025/26 season and joined the UEFA Referees Committee. Her last match was Denmark against Sweden on 5 June 2026. Her Ligue 1 record is worth keeping for a different reason: 13 matches, 4.00 yellows per game and not one red card.
Benoît Bastien is the larger loss in volume: 20 Ligue 1 matches, more than anyone else in the division, at a notably low 3.35 yellows per game. Take him, Thomas Leonard, Benoît Millot, Frappart and Gael Angoula out together and 25 per cent of the 2025/26 sample belongs to officials who will not work a Ligue 1 match this season.
Three names on the 2026/27 list have no Ligue 1 match in our 2025/26 sample: Geoffrey Kubler, Aurélien Petit and Azzedine Souifi. We hold no rate for any of the three, and we would rather publish a gap than dress up a Ligue 2 rate as a top flight one. Foot Mercato's 2026/27 table has each of them on a handful of matches so far, which is useful for tracking appointments and far too small to price anything.
Letexier and Buquet are not the same bet
A card rate is a nice fact. An over rate is a price. This is the same pool of referees expressed as the share of their matches that cleared each card line, which is the form a market actually takes.
| Referee | Matches | Over 3.5 | Fair odds, over 3.5 | Over 4.5 | Over 5.5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| François Letexier | 18 | 83.3% | 1.20 | 50.0% | 22.2% |
| Bastien Dechepy | 16 | 81.2% | 1.23 | 43.8% | 31.2% |
| Abdelatif Kherradji | 11 | 72.7% | 1.38 | 36.4% | 18.2% |
| Jeremy Stinat | 14 | 71.4% | 1.40 | 42.9% | 14.3% |
| Marc Bollengier | 17 | 70.6% | 1.42 | 52.9% | 35.3% |
| Jérôme Brisard | 16 | 68.8% | 1.45 | 56.2% | 43.8% |
| Willy Delajod | 17 | 52.9% | 1.89 | 29.4% | 0.0% |
| Romain Lissorgue | 10 | 50.0% | 2.00 | 50.0% | 30.0% |
| Clement Turpin | 18 | 44.4% | 2.25 | 22.2% | 0.0% |
| Gael Angoula | 12 | 41.7% | 2.40 | 16.7% | 0.0% |
| Eric Wattellier | 17 | 35.3% | 2.83 | 23.5% | 11.8% |
| Ruddy Buquet | 18 | 33.3% | 3.00 | 16.7% | 5.6% |
| Ligue 1 average | 309 | 58.6% | 1.71 | 36.9% | 19.1% |
The honest version of the Ligue 1 edge is this table rather than the card rate table above it. Letexier cleared over 3.5 cards in 15 of his 18 matches, Buquet in 6 of his 18. Fair odds of 1.20 against 3.00 on identical markets, decided by whose name is on the appointment sheet. Nobody is offering 3.00 on a Buquet game and nobody needs to: the mispricing sits mid table, where a referee at 1.40 gets priced like the league at 1.71.
Two cautions. These are single season samples of ten to twenty matches, so a referee two matches either side of a line moves ten points. And an over rate is a joint product of the official and the fixtures he was given, which is why the booking points model belongs alongside it: weighting a red at 25 against a yellow at 10 separates a referee who shows many yellows from one who reaches for the second.
Fouls per card, the number that makes Ligue 1 different
Ligue 1 referee card stats are usually published as yellow totals, which conflates two different things. A league can be strict because its football is dirty or because its referees are quick, and only the ratio of fouls allowed to cards shown separates them.
| Referee | Fouls per game | Cards per game | Fouls per card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ruddy Buquet | 23.2 | 3.00 | 7.7 |
| Benoît Millot | 26.3 | 3.47 | 7.6 |
| Willy Delajod | 24.8 | 3.35 | 7.4 |
| Clement Turpin | 23.0 | 3.33 | 6.9 |
| Abdelatif Kherradji | 28.4 | 4.27 | 6.6 |
| Benoît Bastien | 22.7 | 3.55 | 6.4 |
| Romain Lissorgue | 25.8 | 4.70 | 5.5 |
| Bastien Dechepy | 25.8 | 5.00 | 5.2 |
| Jeremy Stinat | 22.9 | 4.43 | 5.2 |
| Jeremie Pignard | 23.4 | 4.65 | 5.0 |
| François Letexier | 24.1 | 4.83 | 5.0 |
| Jérôme Brisard | 23.1 | 4.75 | 4.9 |
| Ligue 1 average | 24.1 | 4.04 | 6.0 |
France whistles plenty, 24.1 fouls per game, and books relatively little. Buquet allowed 7.7 fouls per card and Letexier 5.0, which is a different refereeing philosophy rather than a different set of fixtures. In cards it is worth 1.8 a game between two officials working the same division.
This is where the live read sits too. If a referee allows 7.5 fouls per card, a scrappy first twenty minutes means much less in his game than in Letexier's, and an in play card price drifting on early fouls is drifting on the wrong input. The same logic drives our guide to how card markets are priced.
The same referee cards differently in Europe
Ten of the officials in the Ligue 1 pool also work UEFA competition, and we hold their European matches separately. Five have four or more European matches, which is the floor at which a comparison is worth printing. It is the part of this data set no other source publishes, and it cuts against the intuition that a referee carries one fixed tolerance everywhere.
| Referee | Ligue 1 matches | Ligue 1 yellows per game | European competition | European matches | European yellows per game | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benoît Bastien | 20 | 3.35 | Champions League | 12 | 4.17 | +0.82 |
| Clement Turpin | 18 | 3.17 | Champions League | 17 | 3.18 | +0.01 |
| François Letexier | 18 | 4.50 | Champions League | 17 | 3.65 | -0.85 |
| Willy Delajod | 17 | 3.12 | Europa League | 5 | 2.60 | -0.52 |
| Jérôme Brisard | 16 | 4.31 | Europa League | 6 | 4.00 | -0.31 |
Clément Turpin is the control case. 3.17 yellows per game over 18 Ligue 1 matches, 3.18 over 17 in the Champions League. One referee, two competitions, the same number to two decimal places. Letexier moves the other way, dropping almost a card from 4.50 in France to 3.65 in Europe, while Bastien rises from 3.35 to 4.17. Turpin and Letexier were the two French officials among the 52 central referees FIFA selected for the 2026 World Cup, and Letexier refereed the 2026 Europa League final as well as the Euro 2024 final.
Read the direction, not the decimal. Five to seventeen European matches is a small sample and the fixtures are not comparable. What the column establishes is that a French official's Ligue 1 rate is not transferable to a European card market without a haircut, which is why our Champions League referee card stats keep the competitions separate.
Reds, penalties and the second half skew
Reds and penalties are the rates most people quote and fewest should. They are rare events, so one season tells you less than it appears to, and the honest use is spotting a referee whose profile is structurally different rather than pricing a red card market off ten matches.
| Referee | Matches | Reds per game | Penalties per game | Cards after half time | Away share of cards |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jeremy Stinat | 14 | 0.500 | 0.14 | 64.5% | 54.8% |
| Jérôme Brisard | 16 | 0.438 | 0.00 | 67.1% | 51.3% |
| Jeremie Pignard | 17 | 0.412 | 0.35 | 45.6% | 51.9% |
| Abdelatif Kherradji | 11 | 0.364 | 0.27 | 51.1% | 55.3% |
| François Letexier | 18 | 0.333 | 0.39 | 70.1% | 56.3% |
| Bastien Dechepy | 16 | 0.312 | 0.38 | 65.0% | 53.8% |
| Eric Wattellier | 17 | 0.294 | 0.41 | 69.1% | 54.5% |
| Marc Bollengier | 17 | 0.294 | 0.29 | 69.6% | 54.4% |
| Mathieu Vernice | 15 | 0.267 | 0.20 | 63.4% | 50.7% |
| Willy Delajod | 17 | 0.235 | 0.47 | 61.4% | 57.9% |
| Ligue 1 average | 309 | 0.249 | 0.26 | 64.1% | 54.0% |
Two things in this table are real. 64.1 per cent of Ligue 1 cards arrived after half time, which is the lowest second half skew among the five event level leagues we count, and Jeremie Pignard is the division's genuine outlier at 45.6 per cent: he is the only regular who books more before the break than after it. For a first half card market that is the difference between a referee who matches the league and one who inverts it.
The away bias is the second: 54.0 per cent of Ligue 1 cards went to the visiting side, and Benoît Millot reached 65.4 per cent. Penalties sit at 0.26 per game, 79 in 309 matches, and the spread from Willy Delajod at 0.47 down to two officials at zero is mostly noise at this sample. Our VAR guide covers why penalty counts need care: a confirmed review duplicates the outcome event.
Turning a Ligue 1 referee rate into a priced bet
Here is the whole method in four steps, using real numbers off this page.
- Start from the league, not the referee. Over 3.5 cards is a 58.6 per cent proposition in Ligue 1, fair odds 1.71. That is your anchor.
- Apply the referee as a shift, not a replacement. Jérôme Brisard's 68.8 per cent is 10 points above the division. Treat the gap as the edge and regress it toward the league, because 16 matches is thin.
- Check the tolerance. Brisard sits at 4.9 fouls per card, among the quickest in France. A referee whose over rate is high because he books early is a better hold than one whose rate came from two red card games.
- Compare to the posted price. If the market is 1.70 and your referee adjusted estimate is 1.45, the edge is the gap. If it is already 1.45, the referee is priced in and there is no bet.
Then check the appointment, because none of this is worth anything until you know who has the game. Our appointments page comes first and this one second. How referee stats win card bets walks the same loop with worked examples.
Put a referee read to work
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What these Ligue 1 referee stats cannot tell you
Five limits, stated plainly, because a number you cannot audit is worth nothing.
One season, not a career. Our Ligue 1 set covers 2025/26 only, so every rate here is a season rate rather than the twenty year career average we can show for English and Scottish officials. Ten to twenty matches per referee is enough to rank a pool and not enough to settle a single fixture.
309 matches against 306 league fixtures. The 2025/26 season was 18 clubs over 34 matchdays, so 306 games. The source files three further matches under the same competition and they are included in every rate here, the same way our football-data.co.uk based cross league table counts them.
No 2026/27 matches are included. The season kicked off on 21 August 2026 and nothing from it is in these rates, nor are the IFAB law changes for 2026/27. Early season card rates are the least reliable numbers in football: five matches per referee moves a rate by half a card on a couple of bookings.
Three of the 2026/27 group have no record here. Kubler, Petit and Souifi took no Ligue 1 match in our sample. Sources also disagree on the group's size: the LFP article claims 19 referees and prints 17 names, Foot Mercato lists 18 including Ben El Hadj Salem, and no primary document we found settles it.
Names come from source strings. Some arrive abbreviated and some with the country appended, which is how one official becomes two rows above. We join those to full names rather than guessing, and anything ambiguous is flagged instead of merged. Our methodology page sets out which fields exist for which competition.
That is the honest edge of this data set. Used with the appointment sheet and a sense of sample size, the referee is still the most reliably mispriced input in a Ligue 1 card market.