Identifying Ligue 1’s Most Valuable Ball-Playing Centre-Backs 2023/2024 – Data Analysis

We’re now just over the midway point in the 2023/24 Ligue 1 season.

Yet again, the self-styled ‘league of talents’ has delivered teams packed with quality of all ages and styles squaring off with one another game-to-game, from teams at the top of the table all the way through the middle of the table and down to the bottom of the league.

There’s quality to be found all over France’s top-flight.

Still, those playing for the more high-profile, dominant teams often get a greater share of the attention than those playing for teams lower down the league table, which perhaps dominates games less as a collective, yet include players whose individual contribution is as vital to their side as any other player in the division.

That’s why, for this scout report and data analysis of the league’s ‘most valuable ball-playing centre-backs’, we’ve gone a bit deeper than just looking at the raw per 90 data, instead focusing on the central defenders’ respective contribution to their team’s per 90 numbers in a few relevant areas (passes per 90, long passes per 90, progressive passes per 90 and passes to the final third per 90) as a percentage and comparing those values with their success rate in each of those statistics.

All centre-backs included in this analysis have played at least 400 Ligue 1 minutes at the time of writing in the 2023/24 campaign.

Possession involvement and long-passing tendencies

Our first section of analysis initially focuses on which centre-backs are most heavily involved in their teams’ possession play.

When just looking at the raw data, the ‘passes per 90’ statistic in Ligue 1 is dominated by PSG players, with four making the top-six — including all of the top three spots — among centre-backs, along with two Nice players.

When looking at each player’s respective contribution to their team’s number of passes per 90, though, the two Nice players referenced above — Dante and Jean-Clair Todibo — are far and away the biggest contributors in the league among centre-backs.

Though Marquinhos and Danilo Pereira of PSG also rank highly here, they don’t dominate simply due to the team they play for and other names that may be overlooked when purely looking at the per 90 data, such as Loubadhe Abakar Sylla and Gerzino Nyamsi of Strasbourg, Yunis Abdelhamid of Reims and Logan Costa of Toulouse catch the eye more.