PSG have been the dominant side in Ligue 1 in the past decade winning 7 out of 10 league titles, and, apart from the odd surprise, they show clear dominance in most of their domestic competition games despite not being able to do the same in the Champions League. This supremacy by the Paris giants, who clearly have the biggest financial power in France, is proving to be one difficult to end as only Lille (2010-2011), Montpellier (2011-2012) and Monaco (2016-2017) where able to steal the league titles from PSG since the club was bought by the Qatar Sports Investments group in 2011.
In this data analysis we’ll try to build a team with the best players in Ligue 1, excluding PSG players, that could potentially challenge PSG and, who knows, beat them. We will take into account PSG’s most used formations and general dynamics in the choosing of the team’s formation and resort to statistics and data to evaluate the players.
Methodology
In this analysis we will look through data from all Ligue 1 players for every position in order to find the best ones, while also taking into account our opponent PSG and our general plan to defeat them.
An analysis of PSG’s most used formations and dynamics will allow us to create our own general strategy, to define our formation and look for players with the right characteristics to play in it.
In order to narrow our data pool and to make it a more realistic one, only players with more than 800 minutes played and that are not from PSG are eligible to be part of the team. We will create a shortlist of players for each position and analyse those player’s statistics to compare them and make our choice.
Tactics and Formations
PSG’s most used formations this season were 4-3-3, 4-4-2 and 4-2-2-2 with the team playing possession-based attacking football. When building their play, PSG often position themselves in a 2-3-5 or 3-2-5 formation, with their full-backs taking up very advanced positions in the field. In the image below we can see PSG’s formation based on players’ average positions throughout the season, we can also see the most common passing links between them.
The mentioned high position that PSG’s full-backs take up leaves a lot of space in the wide areas that can be exploited with through balls into space, as such, we will take this into consideration when choosing our formation and attacking players so we can take advantage of this space.
On the defensive side, we should be aware of PSG’s attackers as they are very fast and skilled players. The likes of Neymar, Kylian Mbappé and Angel Di Maria for example, must not be given any time or space and 1vs1 situations should also be avoided. The same applies to PSG’s midfielders if they have time and space to execute they can play deadly passes for those attackers.
