Season-level reference. Single-matchday material has
been stripped: this is the shape of the division, not a form guide.
Nothing here feeds the model.
Bulgarian First League (efbet Liga) 2026/27: Intel Report
Compiled 22 August 2026. Where I've derived a number myself rather than lifted it from a source, I've said so. Manager entries are omitted throughout because I could not verify them this week and would not guess.
1. League shape, and the format change that matters this season
- 103rd season of the Bulgarian top flight, 79th under a league format, 11th as the First Professional Football League. Sponsor name: efbet Liga. Also known as Parva Liga.
- THE HEADLINE STRUCTURAL CHANGE: the league has been cut from 16 clubs to 14 for 2026/27, the first time it has been this size since 2021/22.
- Started 17 July 2026, ends 29 May 2027. One of the earliest starts of any league in this set.
- Format (as run at 16 clubs in 2025/26, and the best available guide for 14):
- Regular season: 30 matchdays, double round-robin.
- Split into three groups: Championship (top 4), European (5th-8th), Relegation (bottom 8).
- Championship and European groups play 6 further matchdays. The Relegation group plays 7.
- Three direct relegations plus one playoff place against the Second League runner-up.
- Second League is expanding from 17 to 18-20 clubs for 2026/27 as the top flight shrinks.
Model implications.
- The reduction from 16 to 14 clubs changes the entire fixture and points structure. A rating or simulation calibrated on 30-round 16-team seasons is now mis-specified. At 14 clubs a double round-robin is 26 rounds, not 30, and the group sizes must change. The exact 2026/27 group split and matchday count is the single most important thing to verify before modelling this league and I could not confirm it. The 16-team structure above is my best available guide, not a confirmed 2026/27 rule set.
- Three down out of fourteen plus a playoff is a relegation rate of 21-29%, the harshest in any league in this entire seven-league set. Survival is the dominant motivation for most of the division for most of the season.
- Like Greece and Romania, the split means the fixture pool fractures partway through the season. Common-opponent-based ratings degrade from the split onwards.
2. Baseline: 2025/26, and the end of an era
Levski Sofia won their 27th title and their first since 2009, clinching it with four games to spare on 2 May 2026 with a 1-0 win over local rivals CSKA 1948.
This ended Ludogorets Razgrad's run of fourteen consecutive championships, one of the longest domestic monopolies in European football. Ludogorets finished outside the top two and go into 2026/27 in the Conference League rather than the Champions League.
Relegated:
- Beroe Stara Zagora, after seventeen consecutive top-flight seasons. This will be the first campaign without them since 2008/09. Beroe are also the most successful club in Second League history with nine titles.
- Dobrudzha Dobrich and Montana. Montana recorded a 22-game winless run, the longest in the division.
Promoted: Dunav Ruse, Second League champions with a 22-game unbeaten run and their seventh second-tier title.
Composition arithmetic: 16 clubs, minus three relegated, plus one promoted, equals 14. That means the 13th-placed First League club won the promotion/relegation playoff and stayed up.
2025/26 league-level numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|
| Matches | 294 |
| Goals | 676, 2.30 per match |
| Top scorers | Everton Bala and Mamadou Diallo, 18 each |
| Best goalkeeper | Anatoli Gospodinov, 15 clean sheets |
| Biggest home win | Levski 7-0 Septemvri (30 Nov 2025) |
| Biggest away wins | Botev Plovdiv 0-5 Arda; Lokomotiv Plovdiv 0-5 CSKA 1948 |
| Highest scoring | CSKA 1948 5-4 Ludogorets (27 Oct 2025) |
| Longest winning run | CSKA Sofia, 7 |
| Longest unbeaten | Slavia Sofia and Ludogorets, 11 |
| Longest winless | Montana, 22 |
| Longest losing run | Montana, 6 |
2.30 goals per match is the lowest figure in this entire set of twelve leagues, below Ligue 2 (2.49), League Two (2.54) and Serie B (2.56). And it is not an outlier: 2.36 in 2022/23, 2.40 in 2023/24, 2.44 in 2024/25, 2.30 in 2025/26. Bulgaria is structurally the lowest-scoring league covered in any of these reports.
European allocation for 2026/27
- Champions League: Levski Sofia. Drawn to face Borac Banja Luka, with the winner potentially meeting Universitatea Craiova (see the Romania report, which is the same tie from the other side).
- Europa League: CSKA Sofia.
- Conference League: CSKA 1948 and Ludogorets Razgrad.
Four of fourteen clubs in Europe (29%), a high proportion for a league of this size.
3. The 2026/27 field
I have not seen a confirmed 2026/27 club list. My reconstruction, which needs verifying:
| Club | City | Note |
|---|
| Levski Sofia | Sofia | Defending champions, 27th title. Georgi Asparuhov Stadium, ~25,000, the largest in the division. |
| CSKA Sofia | Sofia | 31 titles, the most in Bulgarian history. Longest winning run last season (7). |
| CSKA 1948 Sofia | Sofia (Bistritsa) | The breakaway/successor club. Beat Ludogorets 5-4 and won 5-0 at Lokomotiv Plovdiv. |
| Ludogorets Razgrad | Razgrad | Fourteen straight titles from 2012 to 2025, ended last season. Now in the Conference League. |
| Slavia Sofia | Sofia | Oldest club in Bulgaria (1913). Joint-longest unbeaten run (11). |
| Lokomotiv Sofia | Sofia | |
| Botev Plovdiv | Plovdiv | Conceded 0-5 at home to Arda. |
| Lokomotiv Plovdiv | Plovdiv | Conceded 0-5 at home to CSKA 1948. |
| Cherno More Varna | Varna | |
| Spartak Varna | Varna | |
| Arda Kardzhali | Kardzhali | Won 5-0 at Botev Plovdiv. Recent European participant. |
| Botev Vratsa | Vratsa | |
| Septemvri Sofia | Sofia | Lost 0-7 at Levski. |
| Dunav Ruse (promoted) | Ruse | Second League champions, 22-game unbeaten run, 7th second-tier title. |
Five of fourteen clubs are from Sofia (Levski, CSKA Sofia, CSKA 1948, Slavia, Lokomotiv Sofia, plus Septemvri makes six). That is an extreme geographic concentration and produces a very high derby density.
4. Style and trends: what to feed the model
League-level priors
| Metric | Value | Implication |
|---|
| Goals per match | 2.30 | Lowest of any league covered. Stable across four seasons (2.30 to 2.44). |
| Clubs | 14 (down from 16) | Format change. Re-derive everything. |
| Relegation rate | 3 direct plus a playoff from 14 | 21-29%, the harshest covered. |
| Clubs in Europe | 4 of 14 (29%) | High for a league this size. Congestion matters for Levski, CSKA Sofia, CSKA 1948, Ludogorets. |
| Season | 17 July to 29 May | Earliest start of any league covered, and a long calendar. |
Structural features to encode
- The 16-to-14 reduction is the biggest single change. Do not carry a 2025/26 fixture-count or group-structure assumption into 2026/27. Verify the confirmed matchday count and split rules before running anything.
- The three-group split (Championship / European / Relegation), if retained, means three separate mini-leagues from round 30 onwards with different match counts (6, 6 and 7). Unlike Greece and Romania, Bulgaria does not appear to halve points at the split, which makes it structurally different from its Balkan neighbours. Verify this too.
- The 2.30 goals baseline is the most exploitable single number in this report. If your over/under model carries a shared European second-tier or small-league prior, it will over-predict goals in Bulgaria by 0.2 to 0.3 per match against the Championship or League One, and by nearly 0.7 against the Gulf leagues.
- Ludogorets' fourteen-year monopoly has broken. Any Elo or ratings system with slow decay will still have Ludogorets rated far above the field. They finished outside the top two last season and are now in the Conference League rather than the Champions League. This is a regime change, and slow-decay ratings will lag it by a season or more.
- Sofia concentration. Six of fourteen clubs are Sofia-based. Derby density is very high and travel burden is very low for most of the division, which compresses home advantage relative to leagues with long away trips.
- Attendance is low and volatile. The last figures I have are from 2021/22: a high of 19,000 for Levski v CSKA Sofia and a low of 110. That range (roughly 170x) puts Bulgaria alongside Greece as a league where a per-club home-advantage coefficient is essential rather than optional.
5. Caveats, and they are substantial for this league
- The confirmed 2026/27 club list and format are the two biggest gaps. My 14-club reconstruction is arithmetic from the 2025/26 composition plus the confirmed relegations and promotion, not a sourced list. Verify before use.
- No head coaches verified. Bulgarian managerial turnover is high.
- I do not have the 2025/26 final table, draw share, or attendance data. The goals-per-match figure is solid; the draw share is not derived and I have not estimated it.
- The 2021/22 attendance figures cited are four seasons old and used only to illustrate the range.
- I did not find an outright or relegation betting market for this league. Bulgarian markets are thin and mostly limited to match odds.
- Bulgarian club naming is a persistent data-matching problem: CSKA Sofia and CSKA 1948 Sofia are separate clubs, as are Botev Plovdiv and Botev Vratsa, Lokomotiv Sofia and Lokomotiv Plovdiv, and Cherno More and Spartak (both Varna). Check your feed's club IDs.
Main sources: Wikipedia (2025/26 and 2026/27 First Professional Football League, 2025/26 Second Professional Football League, First and Second Professional Football League overview pages, 2021/22 to 2024/25 seasons for trend data), European Leagues (Bulgarian Professional Football League member profile), Sofascore, Transfermarkt, Grokipedia.