Pair Up, and Strasbourg Stop Losing Every Time
RC Strasbourg Alsace are a different side with Ulysse Pernin and Jason Bradbury together, though their shared season is hardly without trouble.
13 games together: is that enough to call a partnership strong? At RC Strasbourg Alsace, the answer is in the seven games without one of Ulysse Pernin or Jason Bradbury. The centre-backs have shared 13 matches this season, with five wins, two draws and six defeats. In the seven without the pair, Strasbourg have lost all seven.
The contrast is larger at either end. With Pernin and Bradbury together, Strasbourg score 1.5 goals a game and concede 1.6. Without one of them, they score 0.9 and concede 2.9. The partnership has not made the club invulnerable; it has made the alternative look distinctly less useful.
That is a verdict built on comparison, not perfection. Six defeats in 13 is no triumph, and a defence conceding 1.6 a match is not exactly a locked door. Yet Strasbourg have taken points in seven of those shared games. In the other sample, there have been none. The pair’s record is imperfect; the team’s record without one is absolute.
Pernin, 27, is the established half of the arrangement. He joined from Stade Rennais FC on 29 July 2059 for £6.2m and has played 175 times for Strasbourg. He is still early in his Strasbourg career; the figures beside his name already point to a clear practical value. Neither player’s mood is especially sunny: both are listed as unhappy, while Pernin’s morale is abysmal. The results offer a more encouraging account of their work together than either man’s spirits do.
There is history behind the club’s need for steadier numbers. Last September, Strasbourg’s six straight Ligue 1 Uber Eats defeats left them under pressure; a month later, Ismaïla Sarr’s hat-trick helped turn a 5-1 win over Montpellier Hérault SC into a measure of relief. Those results belong to the club’s wider season, not to this pairing’s tally. The current comparison is narrower, and rather harder to ignore: together, a team that can win; apart, a team that has yet to do so.
Pernin and Bradbury have not solved Strasbourg. They have supplied the clearest available evidence of how much worse the side can be without one of them. A partnership with six defeats still needs work. A seven-game run of losses without it needs no further interpretation.