I keep a Saturday-morning Ligue 1 watch group for the French-language students in my department, and the question I field most at the start of every season is the same: which DIRECTV channel actually carries Ligue 1 now? The honest answer for 2025 is that there is no regular DIRECTV channel slot for Ligue 1. The French top flight has not been on DIRECTV's main channel lineup since 2018, and it has moved through several different broadcasters since.
The chapter most people still remember is beIN Sports. beIN Sports launched on DIRECTV on August 16, 2012, and for six seasons it was the home for Ligue 1, Ligue 2, and most of the top European soccer leagues on US screens. That carriage ended in August 2018, when AT&T-owned DIRECTV dropped beIN Sports from its lineup during a carriage dispute. The network never returned to the same DIRECTV channel numbers.
For the 2025-26 season, the rights picture looks different on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, the LFP launched an in-house direct-to-consumer streaming service called Ligue 1+ on August 15, 2025, priced at 14.99 per month. It carries eight of the nine weekly Ligue 1 matches. BeIN Sports France retains one Saturday match per week. For US viewers who want the French commentary track, the cleanest path is beIN Sports Connect, fuboTV, Sling TV, or Vidgo.
If you are determined to keep things on a DIRECTV receiver, you can still add beIN Sports Connect as an OTT app through DirecTV Stream. Otherwise the streaming bundle is what most of my students end up using by mid-October.