Most soccer enthusiasts have heard the perhaps controversial phrase “farmers league” used to refer to the main French soccer league, Ligue 1. For the non-soccer enthusiasts, a bit of history. The term farmers league was coined to refer to teams made up of part time players with day jobs as teachers, electricians, and so forth. Look no further than when Iceland knocked England out of the Euros; arguably the most popular example of a farmers league team. These “part time” teams were the original benefactors of the farmers league term.
However, in recent seasons, pundits, media, and the soccer community at large have been pushing that term onto Ligue 1. A google search of the phrase would have a mention of the ties to Ligue 1. This all started because the competition is believed to be so abysmal with PSG winning the league title in four of the past five seasons, with Monaco snatching the title in the 2016/2017 season.
Then on August 15, 2020 during the second half of the soccer season after the hiatus due to COVID-19, a French team knocked out an English team from the Champions League in the quarter finals. To make matters even more interesting, the English team, Manchester City, were supposedly tournament favourites. The French team, Lyon, had also previously knocked out another heavyweight, this time from Italy, Juventus FC. All these factors led to one of the biggest names in Ligue 1, Kylian Mbappé (whose team was still in the tournament) to post a tweet mocking the controversial tag that had been thrust on Ligue 1 in recent times.
This gave me an idea. With Mbappé’s rallying cry for the football community to have more respect for Ligue 1, and PSG losing the Champions League by a slender 1–0 to Bayern Munich, I decided to explore the validity of these farmers league claims.
The data used in this exploratory analysis was mainly gotten from one central source, football-data. The aim was to explore the statistics of each of the five main soccer leagues (England’s Premier League, France’s Ligue 1, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A, and Spain’s La Liga) over the past 10 seasons.
Most plots shown here have been expanded for better viewing but for an interactive experience that enables league to league comparisons extra features, and more graphs and explorations not shown in this post, look for my notebook on Github. If you’re only interested in the graphs shown in this post, an easier resource for the interactive features would be my Plotly account. The first exploration had to be a fan favourite, total goals scored between each of the leagues over the aforementioned time. Keep in mind that Ligue 1 did not play the full 38 games due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A look at the other seasons however shows that the main leagues output roughly the same number of goals each season.
A better metric would be to look at total goals per game to account for Germany’s fewer games and the break in Ligue’s 2019/2020 season. The grouped bar chart can be seen below.
It can be seen there is no constant outpouring of goals in Ligue 1 due to lesser competition. Ligue 1 is actually below the average of all the leagues for every season except the 2017/2018 season. Germany is the league with the higher propensity for relatively high goal scoring seasons. An idea to gauge the competitiveness of each league as related to its peers was a look at chances created by shots on target.
Once again, Ligue 1 is below the average of its peers in shots per game that test the keeper. At this point, the question has to be asked, is Ligue 1 just a more effective and competitive league or is it a step below its peers, albeit a small step? The best course of action is to explore more data.
An interesting plot was the plot of high goal differential games. I defined high goal differential as games with a goal differential of 4 or more. If the farmers league hypothesis is true, it stands to reason that Ligue 1 would have the most games with a high count if PSG is running rampant against lesser teams whilst teams in other leagues have to struggle. The data however told a different tale.
A total count showed Ligue 1 below the mean line for total high differential games over the past season. The difference is clearer when expressed in terms of percentage to account for number of games played during this duration. Germany takes a clear lead with France and Italy less likely to have these non-competitive games. A density plot that can be found on Github further proves that France and Italy were the leagues more likely to have competitive games ending in a 1 goal differential compared to the other big leagues.
The final exploration I’ll post here was likely the best way to test the farmers league hypothesis, so to speak. Looking at the teams that did well in each season for each league, I compiled the difference in points (referred to as points differential from this point) between the champions and the fourth placed team. Fourth because that is usually the cutoff for Champions League and they can be viewed as “medal runner ups”. Two graphs for the same visualization are below. The first is a line graph to compare to other leagues but especially to show each league’s change over time. The second is a grouped bar plot to fully accentuate the comparison between leagues.
Ligue 1 clearly does not have a high point differential each season compared to the other big leagues. Baring two glaring disparities, the French League appears right on average with the other big leagues. The Spanish and German leagues appear to have been less competitive in the earlier stage of the decade but have gotten somewhat balanced. On the other hand, the English league has seen a steady climb in points differential since the 2015/2016 season.
It’s clear that Ligue 1 as a league of its own is just as competitive as the other big leagues. I added the phrase “as a league of its own” because one major hang-up the soccer community has with French teams is their performance in European tournaments. Unfortunately I could not explore this idea due to lack of easily accessible complete data on the subject. If you’re reading this post and have access to data that would help in exploring the notion of Ligue 1 performance in European championships, I am definitely interested. For now, maybe this exploration combined with two French teams in the last Champions League semi finals with one narrowly missing out on the trophy will be a start for the football community at large to assign Ligue 1 some merit.
Source: Football-Data.co.uk. (n.d.). Retrieved September 19, 2020, from http://www.football-data.co.uk/
FootyStats (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2020, from https://www.footystats.org/
