Marseille have never lost four of their first five, and Le Classique put them in the relegation zone
Paris Saint-Germain won Le Classique 2-1 at the Velodrome with three goals and a red card inside eleven minutes, leaving Marseille 17th on three points after the worst start in the club’s history.
Sep 21, 2026
Marseille have never started a season the way this one has started. Four defeats in the opening five games, the last of them at home to Paris Saint-Germain, and a Monday morning spent sitting in the relegation place.
PSG won Le Classique 1-2 at the Velodrome on Sunday night, in a game that was goalless for 66 minutes and then produced three goals and a red card in eleven.
Eleven minutes of football
Nothing much happened for an hour. Desire Doue had a chance in the first half and Ousmane Dembele lifted a lob over the bar, and the sides went in level at the break with the Velodrome still in it.
Then Doue crossed from the left in the 66th minute and Ferran Torres, on as a substitute, headed PSG in front.
Marseille answered inside six minutes. Amine Gouiri fed Angel Gomes inside the box, Gomes went past Willian Pacho and put a right-footed finish inside the post, and for about 120 seconds the Velodrome had the night it wanted.
Nuno Mendes ended that with a long cross in the 74th. Marquinhos got to it, saw his first effort come back at him, and buried the rebound. Three minutes after that, Timothy Weah fouled Mendes, collected a second yellow card and left Marseille with ten men and thirteen minutes plus stoppage time to find an equaliser. Weah is their captain.
They almost found it. Nayef Aguerd got his head to a ball deep in stoppage time at full stretch and put it wide.
Three points from five games
Marseille have one win and four defeats from five Ligue 1 matches, which no Marseille side has managed at the start of a campaign before. They have three points. They are 17th, which in this league is the automatic relegation place, and only Le Havre are below them.
The one win was Bruno Genesio’s first game in charge, 4-0 against Strasbourg at the Velodrome on 21 August. Since then it has been Monaco, Paris FC, Rennes and now PSG, and the fixtures have not been the problem so much as the fact that Marseille have scored seven goals in five games while conceding eight.
Genesio’s own record against PSG makes it stranger. He had beaten them six times since first facing them in January 2016, more than any other coach in that period, and he did all of it before he ever worked in Marseille. His first attempt at it from the Marseille bench ended like this.
The Velodrome has stopped being an advantage
This fixture is sold to the world on atmosphere, and the atmosphere has not translated into results for a long time. Marseille have now won one of their last fourteen home league meetings with PSG.
That is the context people miss about Le Classique. It is the biggest match in French football and it has also been, for more than a decade, a game Marseille usually lose at home.
PSG are fine, and sixth
This was only PSG’s second league win of the season. Luis Enrique’s side have eight points from five games, two wins and two draws and the 2-1 defeat at home to Monaco, and they sit sixth.
Monaco are top on thirteen, unbeaten, and have beaten both Marseille and PSG already. Lyon and Paris FC are next on eleven. The two clubs French football organises its calendar around are sixth and seventeenth, five games into the season, and that is the part worth keeping an eye on rather than the scoreline.
For PSG the useful detail is where the goals came from. Torres off the bench, Marquinhos from a rebound in a crowded box, the captain and a substitute rather than Dembele or Doue finishing what they created. A team that took two points from its first three games will take that.