On the other side of the Channel, our colleagues at The Athletic took out the databases, the huge tables and ran their algorithms at full speed. In an article, the English sports media explains why according to calculations by the Twenty First Group tool, specializing in sports data, Ligue 1 is the most competitive championship in Europe this season.
The Athletic explains that the Twenty First Group uses a machine learning algorithm that generates a rating for every football team in the world. From there, we can draw the strength of the championship. Unsurprisingly, La Liga dominated between the 2008-2009 and 2017-2018 seasons before the Premier League came to occupy first place in this ranking. Arsenal is also considered the best team in the Twenty First Group tables.
But then, where is our good old Ligue 1, the one that our English friends love to call “Farmers League”? Patience, we'll get there. The Athletic explains that then, we must ask ourselves what is the distribution of level between all the teams in the same league. “Two leagues can have the same average ranking, but one of them can have 20 teams of equal quality, while the other has a huge imbalance between the best and worst teams,” the outlet writes.
From his calculations, it appears, for example, that Serie A has a wide variety of team rankings while its little sister, Serie B, has a greater concentration of teams of similar qualities. Data specialists are now going even further by using a model from the Twenty First Group, called “value”. It calculates “each player’s contribution to their team based on their position, based on a performance rating [so as to focus] on the player’s inherent value,” explains The Athletic. By accumulating all the values of each player, we obtain the value of the squad.
It now remains, as above, to analyze how these workforce values are distributed in the league. Twenty First Group then uses a tool used by economists to study, for example, wealth gaps within a country: the Gini coefficient. In short, the closer the index is to 0, the more the teams have similar values. Conversely, an index of 100% means that the value of the championship is carried by only one team. And this is where our Ligue 1 finishes on top.
With a coefficient of 36.5%, Ligue 1 is the most competitive competition this season, just ahead of the Premier League (36.7%), La Liga (37.9%), Serie A (38%) and the Bundesliga (43%). On this subject, The Athletic provides some explanations, without forgetting that one club remains above. “Paris Saint-Germain unquestionably dominates the French top division with its squad worth £816 million (€946 million), more than double that of its closest competitor, Rennes,” we read .
A fierce race for Europe
But the British media indicates that “the competitive performances of Monaco, Lille, Nice, Lens, Marseille, Lyon and Rennes allow greater equality in the championship, where everyone will fight for a European place”, adding that “the outperformance of Brest », currently second in Ligue 1, is obviously playing. “The increased competitiveness of Ligue 1 could also be influenced by the reduction from 20 to 18 teams this season. With fewer teams, you are more likely to have a more concentrated spread of quality across the league,” writes The Athletic. The English place Ligue 1 at the top of the rankings. It's rare enough to point it out, and we're not going to complain about it.