France: Ligue 2:

 

Ligue 2 will be our Friday "morning" staple for most of the next nine months and it feels a little like the return of an old friend, as most of you know, we usually preview 3-5 matches in some depth, this season will be no different, although through the opening round or two, previews will be shorter than normal, stakes a little lower and we will be more selective, just until we get into the swing of things.
 

We usually start the new season with a look at how the second half and last ten matches of the previous campaign panned out, these have tended to be good indicators of how teams will do this time round, although less so last year, with Angers who really struggled at the end of 13/14 earning promotion to Ligue 1, but in general terms, teams who had a poor end to their previous campaign in this league have struggled and vice versa, especially early in the new season.
 

Nancy and Le Havre ( both with 31 points) and Niort (29) were the best performers through the second half of the season, Ajaccio, Valenciennes and Sochaux were the worst with just 18 points, with 23 points the next lowest. Over the final 10 starts, Nimes were far and away the poorest performer with just 5 points, but there were reasons for that, in that they were told they would not be promoted having forced themselves into top 3 contention and they were likely to be relegated, due to "match fixing" charges, this has now been reduced to an eight point penalty with which they will start the season, but even that is subject to appeal. Clermont enjoyed a very strong finish and collected 20 points ( 2.0 per game) over their final ten matches and hauled themselves up into mid table safety after looking in trouble, finally finishing as close to Nancy in 5th as they were to the drop zone.
 

Of couse, we are only discussing the teams who played in Ligue 2 last season, Lens, Metz and Evian are coming down from the top flight, the first two after just a single season in Ligue 1, but they are both "big" clubs, whereas Evian are tiny and after many years of overachieving they could be heading back to their true level. It is six seasons since a relegated team went straight back up, even a club with the financial clout of Monaco took two seasons to return and it is a very tough adjustment. Over the last five seasons, average finishing position for a relegated team is 10th, eight were higher than that, five lower and two right on the money , so that mean number feels about right and the most likely scenario is that two of these will have a reasonable season, but come up short and the other will struggle.
 

Promoted teams have been a real mixed bag, with the last five seasons, seeing 4 relegated, with three of those finishing bottom of the table and four being promoted, with three going up as champions ! The other six (only 14 teams promoted) never really troubled the top 3, four were booked for mid table pretty much from the get go, but all were either bigger clubs or teams with a lot of previous Ligue 2 experience. If you can retain that winning mentality and hit the ground running you can obviously do well, potentially very well, but several teams have come up ill prepared and with a third tier squad and never got competitive and two of the teams coming up this time, look set to fall into that category, the exception being Paris FC, more of them later in the week .
 

Opening day is traditionally low scoring with 2.26 goals per game over the last five seasons, with 36% of matches ending in draws (32% for the full five seasons), I guess that is about what we would expect, no one wants to lose their opening fixture and the only teams "gambling" late are likely to be those losing and teams might be more willing to take a point this week or next, than they will in the future.