It’s a rare few days in European football this weekend as we witness four top flight derbies spread across the best leagues on the continent. Here, we go through them all and what makes these games so vital this weekend.
Two sides experiencing one of their worst campaigns in Ligue 1 history meet here and while it was a must-win anyway given the league form, losing in the Derby Rhône-Alpes will make things unbearable for either Lyon or Saint-Étienne.
👟 @Zaydou_Youssouf #Derby J-3️⃣ pic.twitter.com/rWqrdMQLRn— AS Saint-Étienne (@ASSEofficiel) January 18, 2022
👟 @Zaydou_Youssouf #Derby J-3️⃣ pic.twitter.com/rWqrdMQLRn
Lyon are 11th in the table, and although this is still six points off the top four, it is also 11 points adrift of the drop zone. On the other hand, Saint-Étienne have had one foot in Ligue 2 for some time as they sit rock bottom with 12 losses from 20 games, 42 goals conceded, and with only 12 points.
A win here though and their fight to get out of the relegation zone suddenly gets a bit of a kick.
In what is always the second biggest game of the season in the Netherlands after the De Klassieker, PSV Eindhoven play hosts to Ajax with the winner set to go to the top of the table. PSV are currently first and ahead of their rivals here by a mere point.
However, Ajax's astonishing goal difference record of +55 (59 scored, four conceded) is unrivalled in Europe, and they have kept an outrageously impressive 16 clean sheets from 19 league games.
There's been 175 meetings since 1931 between these two and Ajax have won 79 compared to PSV's 65. The last meeting ended in a 5-0 demolition for Ajax as they kept another clean sheet and scored a bunch too, and in reality, it’s pretty incredible how they are not top of the table.
Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur will meet in another London derby in the Premier League and it comes just a week after they clashed in the second leg of the League Cup semi-finals. The Blues would win 3-0 on aggregate after defeating the Lilywhites 1-0 last Wednesday and it was Antonio Conte’s first set of games against his former club.
It ended in misery for the Italian and these two losses were also the first Conte has tasted on the domestic front since joining the London club. For Chelsea, however, their 76 wins to Spurs' 54 show their dominance in this rivalry over the past 122 years.
Napoli will look to heap more misery on bottom-placed Salernitana as they also aim to get closer to the Milan clubs in the title race.
This isn’t one of the most famous derbies in Italy, and given how Salernitana are bottom of the table and spend much of their time outside of Serie A, it’s one we rarely see. For the derby itself, it derives from the Italian region of Campania in the south of the country, and this Derby della Campania sees the battle of Salerno and Naples. Moreover, following 23 years of absence from the Italian top flight, the two have only met twice this century, as Napoli won 1-0 earlier on this season and 3-1 in a 2008 Coppa Italia clash.