Ligue 1 
Troyes host league leaders PSG at the Stade de l’Aube this Sunday for the late-night kick-off. A win here would give the visitors some breathing room at the top of the table but three points would do little to prevent Troyes’ relegation to Ligue 2.
The home side currently sits 18th in Ligue 1 and are ten points adrift from safety. In their 33 games this season Troyes have only managed four wins, only one more than the worst win rate in the league, last-place Angers. However, they have scored an impressive number of goals for a club in their position, scoring 41 goals this season and conceding 70.
In their last five games, Troyes have four losses and one draw. The singular draw came against 16th-place Nantes where Troyes thought they had won it with a penalty from Mama Balde and a 92nd-minute goal from Wilson Odobert only to concede an equaliser in the 96th minute.
Three of Troyes’ losses came against teams in the top half of the table, losing 3 - 1 to second-place Marseille, losing 1 - 0 to ninth-place Nice and suffering a 2 - 0 loss against eighth-place Clermont Foot. Their other loss came against 14th-place Auxerre, the 1 - 0 loss piling more misery onto Troyes’ survival efforts.
PSG sit atop the league once again, but the top of the table is much closer than usual. In the 2021/22 season, PSG only lost four games all season, however, this season with five games left, The Parisians have already lost six games. This has led to the gap back to Marseille being only five points, with Marseille being in better form than PSG, meaning three points against Troyes is vastly important for some comfort at the top.
In their last five games, PSG have three wins and two losses. Their three wins included a routine 2 - 1 win over last-place Angers with a Kylian Mbappe brace, goals from Lionel Messi and Sergio Ramos gave PSG a 2 - 0 win over Nice and an important 3 - 1 win over ten-man Lens. However, the two losses were painful. The first came against seventh-place Lyon, where PSG slumped to a 1 - 0 defeat thanks to a Bradley Barcola goal. The other loss came against tenth-place Lorient. After losing Achraf Hakimi to a red card in the 20th minute, a Mbappe goal was not enough to hold back three goals from Lorient.
Troyes and PSG have met just 20 times in their histories. The hosts have won on just two occasions, with PSG winning 13 times and the points being shared five times. The two players to watch this weekend are Mbappe and Balde. Both are the top scorers for their teams, with Mbappe, the Ligue 1 top scorer, having 23 goals and four assists in 29 games and Balde having 12 goals and three assists in 30 games.
