Ligue 1 Talk

For 20 years, I had worked in the field of political science as a statistician. During that time, I had to crunch numbers for every district on the face of the earth to try to predict voting trends. I created spreadsheets that had fields that were over 200 Excel pages long. So, why not apply some of that know-how to French football?

Each week, I will be doing an overview of the Ligue 1 week. Since I can thank Foxsoccer.tv for showing almost every match online, it gives me an opportunity to see all the matches, all the players, and give a fair assessment of play in each of those matches.

There are a few points the “Power Breakdown” will be covering. Some of them has to do with stats, some don’t.

First, I will be showing the “Goal of the Week”. This is just my personal choice of the best goal for that week. At the end of the season, we will have a “Goal of the Year”.
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Happy New Year!

Well everyone, it is another year come and gone. And instead of talking about all that happened in the Ligue 1 season, as well as the World Cup, I just want to talk about the past season regarding Ligue 1 Talk and moving forward into 2011.

I started this website 16 months ago, and since then it has taken off. 2010 was better than our first year. And next year, we expect to bring you even more news, commentary and fun regarding the Ligue 1 world.

To start of the new year, we will be conducting an exclusive interview with one of the “English voices of Ligue 1″, and the author of the “Spiro Blog” on Ligue1.com, Matthew Spiro. Hopefully we will have many more interviews in the upcoming year.

But I would like to thank a few people that have helped us throughout the year, and they deserve special shout outs. This isn’t really in any order, but here we go. And forgive me if I do miss anyone.
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Was going to put in a photo of Vinnie Jones (don't know why), but decided to keep it French instead.

Hello everyone. Now that my political mind has finally stopped spinning, I can get back to writing about French football.

I will admit, there was a time where I was thinking about not writing about football anymore. But after our feature in L’Equipe and Canada’s Inside Soccer, it has given me the rejuvenation I need to continue. Therefore, I will be back to writing on this site on a daily, or nearly daily, basis.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a political junkie, as I used to be a campaign consultant. So when any election comes around, I am in full election mode. Election Day is like Christmas, the Super Bowl and Boneless Wing Thursday at Buffalo Wild Wings all rolled into one. And with how f’*cked up this election was, I was working overtime on my political blog The Political Hurricane.

But before I get back into writing, there are two main things that I need to do.
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Hey everyone. Sorry I haven’t been on here in a while. I haven’t done much, or watched much, French footy lately because I have been totally submerged in the political scene here in the United States. As you may know, we have an election in six days, and I am kind of a political junkie (as well as a former political consultant). Ligue 1 footy is my booze, but politics is my crack! And with this election being so important, I have just been writing non-stop about it.

I am planning on going down to Kentucky today to help campaign for Jack Conway, who is running against Rand Paul for the US Senate. So, between now and Election Day, I might be a little busy.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention that Ligue 1 Talk has been mentioned in France’s largest sports newspaper, L’Equipe. I would first like to thank Jerome Touboul, one of L’Equipe’s top football writers, specializing in Ligue 1, PSG and Brazilian football, for writing the article. I met him at the PSG games in Chicago and he was a really friendly person who showed great interest in our site. It was nice to see that France has some interest in Americans following their soccer as well.
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Corny, but...

A tous nos nouveaux lecteurs :

merci de nous avoir rejoint sur Ligue 1 Talk. J’ai suivi par Dave les quelques histoires de votre rencontre au Toyota Park et il a été très touché pr votre gentillesse et votre envie d’échanger. Donc merci à tous les Français et Parisiens de Chicago, tout d’abord.

Ce site rassemble des passionnés, aussi bien Américains que Français, de la Ligue 1 et du football français en général. A quelques jours du début de la Coupe du Monde et où la frénésie pré-compétition bat son plein avec le premier match amical remporté par les Bleus hier soir, le site s’anime un peu plus et nous sommes ravis de vous accueillir.

Afin de contenter tout le monde, le site va donc commencer à publier quelques articles en Français, qui seront écrits par votre serviteur, ou par un nouveau collaborateur, Nicolas, qui a gentiment accepté de mettre ses talents à notre service. La majorité des articles restera toutefois évidemment en anglais.

Si vous voulez écrire/débattre avec nous, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter via Twitter ou mail, ou tout simplement à participer dans la section des commentaires.

Bonne Coupe du Monde à tous, et nous essaierons de garder ce site le plus à jour possible, selon les disponibilités des uns et des autres.

To all our non-French speakers

Ligue 1 Talk staff (I like making us sound important) has decided that we’d try and have a few articles in French, as we are welcoming a new contributor. But don’t worry, we are not forgetting about you and you’ll get the same royal treatment you’ve been used to. Just trying to amp up the buzz before the World Cup.

Au revoir!

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I was only able to get this close to the cars.

Hello everyone. As some of you may know I was out of town for the last few days. Therefore, I want to thank Thomas for posting some articles and keeping the site going.

Of course, many of you know that I love French football. And while it is my 2nd favorite sport, most of you who know me very well might know that auto racing is my favorite, bar none. Formula 1, Grand-Am and,  and yes, even NASCAR now (since the addition of JPM) is my sports life. And this weekend I was at the 24 Hours of Daytona. It was amazing! Hopefully soon I will have a racing blog up as well, but it just doesn’t seem to get the type of traffic that this site does. Too bad.

So, I will get up to date in the next day on all of this weekend’s matches. I have one match on DVR and need to watch Foot! tonight for the rest of the highlights. So, just be patient for the next day as I catch up.

Thanks, Dave.

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Hello everyone.

I just want to say thank you for all the people who have visited this site since I started it back in September. Every month, our numbers keep going up. We are on pace to break last month’s hit total by quite a bit. So, again, I want to thank you all.

I do plan on making some changes to the website.

First, we will be adding a podcast to the website. I know I have promised this for a month now, but I think I finally have the tech know-how (I hope) to make it work. And I want to especially thank Richard Farley of Inside the Six, Russian Football Now and Set Piece Analysts for giving us the space to do the podcast.

Second, I am changing the name of the site back to “Everything French Football”. While I did try to make this site unique to Americans, I think we really are reaching a English-speaking community throughout the world. Therefore, football is more appropriate than ‘soccer’.

Third, we are going to be changing our format in the coming months. We will be having team specific pages and up-to-date news and events in everything dealing with French soccer.

Fourth, we are looking for people who are interested in writing. If you would like to write about French football in general or would like to write about a specific team, once we get our team specific pages up, we would be happy to welcome you.

I hope you look forward to the changes that we plan on making in the coming months, and hope you contribute as well.

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Hello everyone. I have a family emergency that I have to deal with so I might not be posting as much the next few days. I am sorry for the inconvenience. I will try to do some posts in the next few days, but won’t be able to do anything in-depth.

By the end of the week, I intend on being back on here full-time.

Dave Trotter

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