End of Paris Saint-Germain monopoly provides refreshing change — Ligue 1 winter break review

Mario Balotelli has been revitalised since joining Nice, helping the club to top the league table at the time of the winter break. Eric Gaillard / Reuters

As Ligue 1 enters its winter break, Ian Hawkey looks at how the French league season is shaping up so far.

Nasser Al Khelaifi, the president of Paris Saint-Germain, on Friday made what has become his traditional end-of-year assessment of the state of Ligue 1 in the pages of Le Parisien newspaper.

He included his customary forecast: “PSG will be champions this season.” Then he said why: “I have seen it in the players’ eyes.”

Well, he needed to see it somewhere, because the evidence is not currently in the published table. The condition of France’s wealthiest club not being top halfway through the campaign is not unknown in the sequence — now four titles long — of uninterrupted monopoly of championnats by PSG, but that they sit two places and five points off the leaders, and have suffered defeats in nearly 20 per cent of their matches is jarring. It’s not what Al Khelaifi nor many clairvoyants would have imagined happening back in mid-August.

Read more:

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■ Premier League team of the season so far: Chelsea provide the spine, Liverpool the attacking verve

In short, French football looks remarkably fluid at the top, at last, and that, seven months after PSG won the title with a 21 point gap between them and silver-medallists Lyon, is good for the league, and good for a football culture that had an important 2016, with the hosting of the European championships.

France the football nation showed itself off reasonably well in June and July, although the national team could not win the title, beaten into second place at the Euros thanks to a goal, ironically, from a player employed in Ligue 1, the Portuguese Eder, of Lille.

Eder’s fame for that single strike will be eternal. His stardom will probably not. It is an enduring truth of the French top flight that the very best talents that pass through it tend to move abroad unless they are stopped at PSG, the one club that can compete with the salaries of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich or the elite of the Premier League, to where even some senior PSG men went in the summer, David Luiz and Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Chelsea and Manchester United respectively.

Paris was bound to look a little different without Ibrahimovic on its skyline. Do PSG miss the larger-than-life Swede? With Ibrahimovic still in command, perhaps PSG would have not dropped some of the points that have slipped away as a new manager, Unai Emery imposes his distinct methods on the team.

Ibrahimovic left a towering goalscoring landmark in the last of his four seasons at PSG, among other legacies, and it is to the credit of Edinson Cavani, his former teammate, that, with 18 goals already this season, Cavani is making Ibrahimovic’s 38 Ligue 1 goals in 2015/16 a target to rise to, not one to be dwarfed by.

It has been a good six months for goalscorers of repute, especially those whose reputations had dwindled. There’s Radamel Falcao who, after two unrewarding loan spells in England, is back at Monaco and firing live ammunition again in the most prolific side — one replete with promising young players learning alongside Falcao — in the division.

And there’s Mario Balotelli, averaging better than a goal every 90 minutes for Nice, who he joined in the summer. Balotelli is still a man any club takes on ready to bear the rough with the smooth, and he has two red cards on his Ligue 1 record already.

But Nice can forgive that. They have shown they have more than just Balotelli-bling about them. It is Nice who go into 2017 top of Ligue 1.

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