Ligue 1 Team Of The Season 23/24 – Data Analysis

As we approach the end of the 2023/24 term in many of the world’s top leagues, it’s inevitable that different publications of varying levels of officiality will publish their respective ‘Team of the Season’ for different leagues and under all kinds of altering parameters, providing different players with a chance to get their flowers at the end of a hard-fought campaign.

In recent days, a couple of Ligue 1 Team of the Season picks peaked my attention, with plenty of well-deserving players receiving the recognition they rightfully deserve, though certain teams tend to dominate.

As a result, the plan to produce a Ligue 1 Team of the Season 23/24 under the Total Football Analysis banner, which could be largely data-driven and representative of 11 different teams that have graced France’s top flight over the past nine or so months, was born.

So, as alluded to above, this piece relies heavily on Ligue 1 data analysis and statistics to select 11 all-stars from this past French top-flight campaign deserving of being named in a Team of the Season.

As some quick caveats, this piece is not attempting to name the unequivocal best player in each position chosen, nor is it aiming to pick out the best player of each team represented in the article.

Rather, it’s attempting to strike a balance somewhere between those two factors in the interest of creating a more representative Team of the Season with a slightly different take to some of the others you’re likely to see.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

Goalkeeper: Brice Samba, 30 years old, RC Lens

We’ve chosen to use a 4-3-3 shape for our Team of the Season — the same formation that league winners PSG primarily used throughout the campaign.

Between the sticks, we’ve gone for Lens stopper Brice Samba, who joined Les Sang et Or almost two years ago for a €5m fee after a promotion-winning campaign from England’s second tier with Nottingham Forest.

The France international has proven excellent value for money in that time, with the 2023/24 campaign seeing him finish second on the clean sheets table to Nice’s Marcin Bułka, second on the ‘prevented goals’ table to PSG’s Gianluigi Donnarumma and end up in the 86th percentile for the ‘save rate’ statistic among his peers from Europe’s top-five leagues.

The amount of prevented goals displayed on the above graph is absolutely nothing to be scoffed at and provides clear evidence as to why we believe Samba earned his place in our team.