Marseille look for way out of crisis against bitter rivals Lyon

Away from Paris Saint-Germain’s quest to hold off Lens and retain the Ligue 1 title, Marseille and Lyon are fighting it out for France’s last automatic Champions League qualifying berth and face off in a huge game on Sunday.

PSG’s crushing dominance of French football, with 11 league titles won in the last 13 seasons, means the biggest rivalry in Ligue 1 these days is arguably that between the clubs from the country’s second and third-largest cities.

Marseille have not been champions since 2010 while Lyon won the last of their seven straight titles in 2008.

Often these days getting into the Champions League is as good as it can get for the clubs, and even if Lyon have not featured in Europe’s elite competition since reaching the semi-finals in 2020.

However, OL are on course to qualify this season, with a recent seven-match winning run in the league propelling them above crisis-hit Marseille into third.

Only the top three in Ligue 1 qualify directly for the league phase of the Champions League, with the team in fourth having to go through two qualifying rounds.

Lyon, who had won 13 games in a row in all competitions before a 3-1 loss in Strasbourg last weekend, are currently five points better off than fourth-placed Marseille before travelling to face their rivals at the Velodrome on Sunday.

“It is no big drama, we just have to accept it,” said Lyon coach Paulo Fonseca after last week’s game.

“We are not going to win every game we play until the end of the season. We are not a super-team,” added the 52-year-old from Portugal, whose first game in charge of Lyon was a 3-2 defeat in Marseille a year ago.

If he is relaxed right now, the same cannot be said of anyone at Marseille, who have not won any of their four Ligue 1 games played since being knocked out of the Champions League at the end of the league phase in late January.

Roberto De Zerbi’s spell as coach ended after a 5-0 hammering by PSG on February 8, and his replacement Habib Beye’s debut last weekend ended in a 2-0 loss at Brest.

Marseille have collected just eight points from seven league matches in 2026 and must turn that around as failure to return to the Champions League would have a huge impact on their finances.

“There is an understandable loss of confidence with the negative dynamic at the moment. It’s getting to the players,” said Beye before taking his squad off to Spain for a training camp in Marbella this week.

Player to watch: Esteban Lepaul

The Rennes striker’s brilliant strike in a 3-0 victory at Auxerre last weekend was his third goal in three games and helped Franck Haise get off to a winning start in his first match as coach of the Brittany side.

Lepaul, 25, has now scored 12 goals in Ligue 1 this season including one for Angers before he joined Rennes in a reported 15 million-euro ($17.7m) transfer in late August.

Only Marseille’s Mason Greenwood (14) and Strasbourg’s Joaquin Panichelli (13) have scored more in Ligue 1 this season than Lepaul, a former Lyon academy player whose father Fabrice won the league with Auxerre in 1996 before dying in a road accident in 2020.