Dynamo Kiev vs Rennes Predictions

Despite going down to ten men, Dynamo Kiev rallied and came out on top in France thanks to a late winner, so they’ll be confident of getting the better of Rennes now back in Ukraine. Thursday’s hosts are currently level on five points with Astana in Group K, while Rennes are only two points behind. Whoever wins this game will put themselves in a strong position as far as qualification for the knockouts is concerned.

On the face of it, Dynamo have done well during the first half of this group campaign, though if we dig a little deeper, it’s easy to feel that the Ukrainians have rode their luck a tad. On the overall balance of play, they were fortunate to take a point away from their match against Jablonec, as the fact that they emerged from that match with an expected goal difference of -0.66 suggests, while they were even luckier to beat Rennes in the reverse of this fixture. On that occasion, Kiev came out of the game with an expected goal difference of -0.84.

On the bright side, Thursday’s hosts played reasonably well in their only previous home match in Group K, though they did manage to concede two goals.

Since beating Jablonec on match-day one, nothing has really gone the way of Rennes and it could easily be thought that they’re struggling to compete on the continent, though from a performance point of view, the French side have played well. They certainly did enough to beat Kiev in the reverse fixture, while their performance did not merit losing away in Kazakhstan on match-day two.

From a creativity point of view, Rennes, who’re averaging 1.54 expected goals per match in the Europa League this season, have done well, while they’ve also limited their opponents, giving up just 0.65 expected goals on average. To say the least, their average expected goal difference of +0.89 is far better than Dynamo’s, which current sits at -0.45.

Overall, it’s easy to conclude that Rennes have been better than the hosts in this competition, despite what the standings suggest, so backing the visitors to get a favourable result is hard to resist at the prices.