2014–15 Top 14 season
| 2014–15 Top 14 | |
|---|---|
| Countries |
 France
|
| Date | 16 August 2014 – 13 June 2015 |
| Champions | Stade Français |
| Runners-up | Clermont |
| Relegated |
Bayonne Lyon |
| Matches played | 182 |
| Attendance | 2,403,593 (average 13,207 per match) |
| Tries scored | 682 (average 3.747 per match) |
| Top point scorer |
Jonathan Wisniewski (Grenoble) 325 points |
| Top try scorer |
David Smith (Toulon) 13 tries |
| Official website | |
| www |
|
|
← 2013–14
2015–16 →
|
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The 2014–15 Top 14 competition was a French domestic rugby union club competition operated by the Ligue Nationale de Rugby (LNR). Two new teams from the 2013–14 Pro D2 season were promoted to Top 14 this season, Lyon and La Rochelle in place of the two relegated teams, Perpignan and Biarritz Olympique. Home-and-away play began on 16 August 2014 and ended on 23 May 2015. This was followed by a playoff stage involving the top six teams, culminating in the final on 13 June 2015.
The top six teams at the end of the regular season (after all the teams played one another twice, once at home, once away) enter a knockout stage to decide the Champions of France. This consists of three rounds: the teams finishing third to sixth in the table play quarter-finals (hosted by the third and fourth placed teams). The winners then face the top two teams in the semi-finals, with the winners meeting in the final at Stade de France.
The LNR uses a slightly different bonus points system from that used in most other rugby competitions. It trialled a new system in 2007–08 explicitly designed to prevent a losing team from earning more than one bonus point in a match, a system that also made it impossible for either team to earn a bonus point in a drawn match. LNR chose to continue with this system for subsequent seasons.
France's bonus point system operates as follows:
If teams are level at any stage, tiebreakers are applied in the following order:
Normally, the teams that finish in 13th and 14th places in the table are relegated to Pro D2 at the end of the season. In certain circumstances, "financial reasons" may cause a higher placed team to be demoted instead. This last happened at the end of the 2009–10 season when 12th place Montauban were relegated thereby reprieving 13th place Bayonne.
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