The quest for the Ligue 1 crown
February 25th, 2025by Mohamed
Ligue 1 only has 12/13 games left to decide a domestic champion, something that in the past two years was as easy a question to answer as whether the sky was paris Saint-Germain is the two time defending champions, a club that have won the last two French domestic titles by an average of 10.5 points. A club filled with stars amongst stars in Ligue 1 and Europe: Edinson Cavani, Thiago Silva, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Marco Verratti and more.
This season was supposed to represent more of the same, a brisk walk in the park while the club focused on the Champions League (something that former sporting director Leonardo once said).
It's been anything but that. For the first time since 2025-12, there's a real possibility that Ligue 1's top team will be from one of the other 19 clubs. Both Olympique Marseille and Olympique Lyonnais have had resurgent and in some cases, surprising seasons whether through the eccentricity of a manager or the rewarding of youth and exuberance.
A look into the three candidates for the Ligue 1 crown including stats of my own and title winning % projections via BSports:
Marseille
Pseudo expected goal ratio: 0.607 (second)Shots on target rate: 0.584 (fourth)Team ratings: 592.1 (third)Projected points: 72.6 (third)Winning %: 6.8%
It seems like it was only just yesterday that Marseille were the feel good story of Ligue 1. Marcelo Bielsa was accidentally sitting on a cup of coffee, Andre Pierre-Gignac was scoring goals for fun at an unsustainable rate, Andre Ayew was doing rabona goals and Marseille on a club level were scoring almost everything that moved.
I wrote about this a month ago when the scoring started to dry up:
How can we then explain that Marseille surge? Well again, when your conversion percentage during that five game stretch is ~50%, chances are that you're likely to score a boatload of goals. Between week four and week ten, Marseille scored 20 open play goals when their ExPG data had them pegged at 13.5.
Is it possible that Bielsa had some sort of part in how Marseille went considerably above how the ExPG data predicted during that eight week stretch? Perhaps.
Marseille did have two managers last season so there was certainly an ample amount of turmoil, and there's something to be said for having a manager who on a national team level favored attack minded football. But even if we accept that, Marseille's attack has pretty much returned back to what the pseudo ExPG data predicted.
The offense has continued to stall and perhaps a more pressing issue is the fact that the club has started to show their flaws defensively. Rod Fanni and Jeremy Morel are a shaky center back pairing for a club wanting to win a league title.
Brice
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