Ligue 1: Mbappé, Lens, rainbow jersey ... Favorites and scratches of the 2022-23 season

The curtain fell this Saturday on the 2022-23 Ligue 1 season. An exercise that will once again have aroused emotion, wonder and annoyance. Lens has enchanted French football as much as Angers has exasperated it. In the end, Kylian Mbappé's PSG always wins. But the championship cannot be limited to the club of the capital. Here are our favorites and our scratches the day after the last day.

FAVORITES

It's not his best season in Ligue 1, because 2023 was complicated with the World Cup to digest. Also because Kylian Mbappé's standards are at a dizzying height. The striker is one of the rare satisfactions of Paris Saint-Germain, champion of France without shining. He finished top scorer in Ligue 1 (29 goals) for the 5th time in his career, a record he shares with Carlos Bianchi, Delio Onnis and Jean-Pierre Papin. With 10 goals in the last 8 matches and the assist of the title for Lionel Messi, Mbappé saved the furniture of PSG.

SEE ALSO – Messi's goal in Strasbourg which gave the L1 title to PSG on May 27 (1-1)

We knew them capable of feats, since their comeback in 2020. But still. Lens became the fourth club to reach 84 points in L1 after Paris (7 times), Monaco (2017) and Lyon (2006). The Sang et Or were worthy of their public with 17 victories in 19 home matches, present in the big meetings with a polished game, rewarded with the trophy for best coach for Franck Haise. All with the 10th budget of the championship. From start to finish, the Lensois soap opera will have fascinated football lovers. Long live the Champions League.

During the night of June 8 to 9, several employees of Olympique Lyonnais were requisitioned to plaster the walls of the city. Five years after leaving for Arsenal, Alexandre Lacazette returns to his training club. “It was a tricky bet to come back, I left leaving a beautiful image and I didn't want to take away this beautiful image, confided the new OL captain a few days ago. But I wanted to take up this challenge.” Successful bet. 27 goals this season in Ligue 1, second top scorer in the championship behind Kylian Mbappé. The General is involved in half of his team's goals and has perfectly fulfilled his role as a leader with the younger generation. A second season in confirmation?

At the beginning of February, we were already talking about these coaches who had a polish on Ligue 1. We must pay tribute to the discreet work of Régis Le Bris, inexperienced before this first season as N.1 in Lorient. The Hakes played and played well. Candidate for Europe in mid-season before sticking out his tongue.

In Reims too, there was new blood. Will Still, 30, did not have the diplomas, but his club was right to pay fines (25,000 euros) for each match. The Belgian coach, who is not in the language of wood, guided Reims in a series of 19 matches without defeat and a comfortable maintenance.

If we praise the profitability of RC Lens, what about that of Clermont Foot? The 19th budget of L1 finished 8th in the standings. For the second season in its history in the top flight, the Auvergne club was once again able to count on the miracles of its trainer Pascal Gastien. Clermont "does not rush the stages", he told us three months earlier, and has (almost) not denied his principles of offensive play. The detrimental departures last summer (Bayo, Abdul Samed, Zedadka...) were never felt. There are even 8 wins in the last 10 matches. The success of hard work and patience.

CLAW STRIKES

What do Lyon and Marseille have in common? They celebrate their 11 years without a trophy. A heresy for two monuments of French football. OM are very open to criticism for their failure in the Coupe de France, at home by Annecy (2-2, 6-7 on penalties) after taking out the Parisian favorite (2-1). OL are no less so, beaten by Nantes, however in bad shape in the semi-finals (1-0).

SEE ALSO – The summary of Nantes-Lyon and the splendid goal of Blas in the semi-final of the Coupe de France (1-0)

And it's not as if the Olympiques had caught up elsewhere. Marseille finished last in their group in the Champions League and, in the league, saw Lens put it in the rearview mirror with style. In Lyon, Laurent Blanc discovered a building site. The beautiful farewells to Jean-Michel Aulas do not erase a new failed season and without Europe at the end.

In four years at the head of OGC Nice, the petrochemical group Ineos, embodied by Jim Ratcliffe, has skimmed five coaches … and surely a sixth in a handful of days, because Didier Digard is on an ejection seat. Last summer, Ratcliffe welcomed the return of Lucien Favre to the club, because “we like his way of developing his teams and corresponds perfectly to the vision we have at Ineos”. We saw nothing until his dismissal in early January. We liked the second wind driven by Digard, which withered at the end of the season. Released without glory by Basel in the quarter-finals of the Europa League Conference, Nice will not be European next year. Go back.

We would have liked for the SCO, which came close to the lowest total of points in the history of the elite, for the season to end earlier. For some of his characters, we would have liked never to see them. No one has talked about Angers as much as with its trainer Abdel Bouhazama and his mind-blowing remarks about women. He then minimized the accusation of sexual assault against his player Ilyes Chetti, who admitted the facts.

At the end of March, Saïd Chabane, president and owner of the club for a decade, resigned. He had been accused by 3 women of sexual assault in 2020 and will appear in court in June. In early April, he was taken into custody on suspicion of money laundering. With him, the SCO, symbol of stability since its return to L1 in 2015, will have collapsed even faster than it was erected.

Praising love and tolerance for the duration of a match is understood by 99% of French football. A handful of players refused, in May, to wear a jersey with rainbow flocking, a symbol of the fight against LGBTphobia. Beyond these refusals, which are sometimes explained by pressure in the country on the player and the family, as for the Algerian Mostafa Mohamed, the debates aroused hit the plate.

Éric Roy, coach of Brest, castigated … the timing of this campaign, which would have distorted the fight for maintenance. "It's just to say that we have to fight homophobia because there are injustices, people who are beaten up, killed because they are homosexual", summed up the OM community perfectly, Valentin Ronnier. Because like the Vinicius case in Spain, football can and must see beyond the end of its nose.

"Football is a reflection of our Kleenex society," Stéphane Moulin, then Angers coach, told us in 2019. With the transition to 18 clubs in L1 which involved four relegations this season, clubs have never treated their coaches like disposable tissues. They are 12 to have been relieved of their functions. Angers and Montpellier even did it twice. It's less about building, and more about pressing all the buttons on the machine and hoping it works. In the lot, there is Troyes, who sacked Bruno Irles when the team was 13th. His successor, the Australian Patrick Kisnorbo, was chosen by the City Group, owner of ESTAC. The Trojans have not won any of their last 19 matches and will return to L2. Well seen...