Betalogue

Comparing the current standing for the French Premier League with the final standing for the EPL, it’s fairly easy to see what’s wrong with the French league. With only two more games to play, the current leader (Lyon) has 67 points from 19 wins, 10 draws, and 7 defeats, and a goal difference of +25. This means that at best they’ll finish top with 73 points and maybe a goal difference of approximately +30.

Compare this to Man U and its 83 points from 25 wins, 8 draws, and 5 defeats, with a goal difference of +40, and Arsenal and its 78 points from 23 wins, 9 draws, and 6 defeats, with a goal difference of +43.

Same number of teams, same number of games played, and a world of difference. It doesn’t help that most of the French games I tried to watch this year were awfully boring. We only get the odd TPS game via TV5 Canada, and maybe there were more exciting games elsewhere in the league. But the figures speak for themselves.

(Of course, it doesn’t help that my home team Strasbourg has been stuck in 13th place for the past 3 months and was thrashed 0-4 by Lyon at home last week…)

It’d be interesting to do similar comparisons with the Italian and Spanish leagues — although the Italian league only has 18 teams, which makes it a bit more complicated.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, May 13th, 2003 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.