While Chelsea appears to have the Premier League crown securely wrapped up, the title race in Ligue 1 is going down to the wire.
With eight games left in the French league campaign, only two points separate Paris Saint-Germain (59), Olympique Lyon (58) and Olympique Marseille (57).
PSG came into the season as heavy favourites to defend their title, but both Lyon and Marseille have stuck around at the top. Much of Lyon’s success has come thanks to the 23-year-old forward Alexandre Lacazette, who has been scoring at a blistering pace of 0.9 goals per 90 minutes in Ligue 1. Marseille’s renaissance has come under the leadership of charismatic Argentine coach Marcelo Bielsa.
Despite looking up at the capital club in the standings both Lyon and Marseille will take solace in the fact that they have no European distractions, while PSG has a massive Champions League tie coming up with Barcelona.
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Looking at the teams’ underlying numbers and how they’ve progressed over the season suggests that while Lyon and Marseille have been worthy adversaries PSG still look primed to repeat as champions.
One statistic that tends to be highly correlated with future success is a team’s Total Shots Ratio. TSR is the ratio of how many shots a team takes relative to the total number of shots it takes and concedes. A side with a TSR of 0.5 takes the same amount of shots as their opponents, and anything higher than 0.5 means the team is outshooting their opponents. TSR includes all shots directed at goal, whether or not they are on target.
PSG’s TSR in Ligue 1 is 0.56 while both Lyon and Marseille are at 0.57. There is relatively little to chose between them, but what is interesting is how these numbers have changed over the season. PSG struggled out of the gate and it wasn’t until December when they started to put up consistent numbers over 0.5, whereas Marseille started very strongly and has cooled off.
Bielsa has been playing a high pressing game with Marseille and fitness may start to be an issue towards the final few games of the season. Even in Marseille’s impressive 4-0 over Lens on the weekend they only managed to outshoot their opponents 14-12.
PSG on the other hand appears to be playing their best football down the stretch and their deep squad will certainly help as they compete on both the domestic and European fronts.
Another statistic that is highly predictive of future success is a team’s Shots on Target Ratio, which is the same as TSR except for the fact that it only includes shots on goal. SoTR often gives a better idea of how a team is performing than just TSR since it refines the sample to include only higher quality shots.
PSG and Lyon have SoTRs of 0.65 and 0.63 respectively, significantly higher than Marseille’s 0.58. Once again Marseille’s SoTR has been in decline since their red-hot start to the season, another sign that they may be slightly limping towards the finish.
These two statistics—TSR and SoTR—show that PSG and Lyon are consistently dominating their opponents while Marseille has fallen off from the levels they were at during their eight game winning streak earlier in the season.
Despite their similar TSR and SoTR numbers what separates PSG and Lyon at this point in the season is luck.
Save percentage is a good proxy for luck. This may seem counter intuitive but there are several reasons for this. First, save percentage has almost nothing to do with the underlying skill of the goalkeeper; in fact good keepers can have wildly different save percentages from year to year.
Second, save percentage is often much more of a reflection of the opposition team’s finishing ability than the actual defensive capabilities of the team in question. Most importantly save percentage tends not to be sustainable or repeatable—teams that have a high save percentage in the short run usually cannot maintain it for long periods of time. So we can consider bursts of high save percentage as “lucky streaks.”
Looking at the save percentages of PSG, Lyon and Marseille throughout the season in the context of “luck,” it’s clear that PSG is coming off a period where they’ve been extremely unlucky while Lyon on the other hand have been quite lucky.
The fact PSG’s save percentage dropped so low and Lyon’s soared so high yet they are still neck and neck in the title race suggests that Lyon’s form may not be as sustainable as PSG’s over the long run.
Over the remaining eight games a lot can happen and when the margins are as tight as they are here the old adage “the table never lies” doesn’t always hold. Teams can get lucky or go on an unexpected streak at the end of the season.
That being said the underlying numbers suggest that despite only two points separating the top three, PSG look to be in a the best position to finish on top and defend their Ligue 1 crown.
Sam Gregory is soccer analytics writer based in Montreal. Follow him on Twitter