The best shot of the match was worth 0.12

A Ligue 1 match with three goals and a team climbing to 11 points sounds like a full afternoon. In reality Paris FC-Strasbourg is the poorest match for chances we have measured so far this season, and all three goals came from situations that were not chances.

The most dangerous shot of the ninety minutes is worth 0.122 expected goals. One time in eight.

The verdict, before the numbers

Expected goals say 0.91 for Paris FC and 0.23 for Strasbourg, for a total of 1.14 in ninety minutes. The average for a match in the five leagues, this season, is more than double that.

The entries into the box, though, are 11 against 2, the shots 16 against 5 and the expected points 1.98 against 0.65. The territorial dominance is there, and it is not up for debate: what is missing is the final quality, from both sides.

The number: 0.122

It is the value of the most dangerous shot of the match, and it is also Paris FC's second goal, a right-footed effort from inside the box just after the hour mark.

The first goal is worth even less: 0.051, a left-footed shot from the edge of the area in the first twenty minutes. The third goal of the evening has no value, because it is an own goal: Strasbourg's only strike came from a misjudged touch by a home defender a few minutes from the end.

Put in order: in a match with three goals, the most dangerous ball anyone touched was worth 0.12, and one of the three goals was not scored by the person who celebrated it.

It does not happen often. Out of 230 matches played this season in the five major leagues, the ones in which neither team built a single shot worth at least 0.15 expected goals are six.

Why it happens

There are two ways to arrive at a match without chances, and here you have both.

The first is Paris FC's pressing, 8.4 PPDA. The home team won the ball high up the pitch all match long and carried play into the opposition box eleven times, but almost always with the Strasbourg defence already set and compact: the ball went in, and found five shirts.

The second is Strasbourg's surrender, 16.0 PPDA and only two entries into the box in ninety minutes. They never tried to push up, and their attack produced 0.23 expected goals, a figure you usually only see in matches played a man down.

The result is that kind of football where everything happens in the middle, and shots come from outside or from impossible positions. At that point whoever is having the right night wins, and that was Paris FC.

The surprising thing: the table does not lie

You would think a team winning matches like this is stealing points. It is the opposite.

After five matchdays Paris FC have 11 points from 11.14 expected points. The gap is -0.14, the smallest in the whole of Ligue 1: they are collecting exactly what they produce. They have scored 8 goals from 9.43 expected goals and conceded 3 from 3.29 allowed, and they have carried 41 balls into the opposition box against 33 conceded.

Put another way: Saturday's match is an exception inside a perfectly coherent season. Paris FC do not live on 0.91 expected goals per match, Saturday's was their poorest attacking performance in five matchdays.

Strasbourg, on the other hand, do have an open account: 7 points from 4.61 expected, and 54 entries into their box conceded in five matches, the second worst figure in the league. They are a team collecting more than they produce and conceding a great deal.

The honest point

First, the data. The shots match the match totals, and the own goal counts as zero in our tally of attempts: that is why Strasbourg's expected goals total, 0.23, does not include their only goal.

Second, the opposite reading, which here is stronger than usual. With 1.14 total expected goals, any take on this match is fragile: if Paris FC had lost 1-0 we would have written the same things with the sign flipped. A match like this says almost nothing about the two teams.

Third, what we think. This is exactly the point and it is why we chose it. Football regularly produces matches where nothing happens and someone wins anyway, and the temptation is to tell them as if there were a tactical lesson inside. There is not. The lesson, if anything, is in Paris FC's table position, which is high because in the other four matches they produced for real.

T.L.

Do you want to see how much each team really deserves its table position? The Meritometro compares real points and expected points. For those who want the models and not the headlines, there is the Nerd Zone.