In France, Angers (for sure), Ajaccio and Troyes seem doomed to drop to the second division. Fighting to escape relegation: Strasbourg, Brest, Nantes and Auxerre.
In France, at least the battle for the title has been settled: PSG are far ahead of the rest of the competition. All it took was one good game from Mbappe and Messi for PSG to win outright against Lens and settle things.
Marseille easily beat Troyes (a team with a poor defence, you can easily bet against them), but these wins come a bit too late for Marseille to have any hope of winning the Ligue 1 title.
Reims ended their fantastic run, in the last round losing quite clearly to Rennes, a team that continues to produce not only great players (Camavinga) but also results. Rennes even has a chance of reaching the European cups next season.
Classic teams like Lyon are for now out of the European cup qualification places. It’s a bumpy league at the top and predictable in the middle.
At the relegation places things are quite different. Strasbourg, Brest, Nantes and Auxerre are all looking for salvation, but to be fair none of them are playing at the standards that the Ligue I require.
Strasbourg and Auxerre have tradition. Brest have ambition (they showed it recently with a win over Toulouse and a draw with Reims). At the same time, Brest loses points haphazardly, as they lost for example against Troyes. You can’t really count on Brest when betting. However, in the last round they narrowly beat a distraught Nice.
Ultimately, it will be the schedule that decides the fight to avoid relegation in Ligue 1. Strasbourg, Auxerre, Nantes and Brest are all reasonably close – over the weekend Auxerre continued their good run by beating Nantes, while Strasbourg got a win against Ajaccio. In our opinion Auxerre will not be relegated, so the fight to avoid the last place leading to Ligue 2 will be between Strasbourg, Brest and Nantes. But the schedule needs to be studied very carefully, the standings need to be looked at in detail and, yes, there is that factor: one of them will be luckier. And that cannot be calculated.
