If AS Roma win their game in hand today, the top seven leagues in the country coefficients will all have their top club leading by 8 points or fewer. Chelsea and Tottenham each play twice the last week, and England, Spain, Portugal, and France could all have their champion decided on the last week. The top league with a lead of more than 8 points is Shakhtar Donetsk's 14 point lead over Dynamo Kiev.
8 points is a lot though. It's quite possible that no top league will have their title race decided on the final day. - I see it quite likely that Spurs will drop points this week and fall way back. Two tough matches coming up. - Races in Italy & Germany are long over. - After yesterday's big win, looks like Monaco isn't dropping points any time soon. In fact PSG have the tougher run-in*; - Ajax lost yesterday. Feyenoord has to beat the 13th place team away otherwise it will come down to the last match, most certainly. Spain and Portugal are the most likely to come down to the final day. In both cases the chasing team is 3 points back, but they have the tiebreak advantage. (* Technically Ligue 1 could come down to the last day, but with PSG needing to win that match by like 15-20 goals. So not sure that really counts as a race going down to the wire).
1. Barcelona and Real Madrid are tied with 75 points. Real Madrid has a game in hand, so they will win by 3 points if both clubs win out. 2. In the top seven leagues I was including Russia, not Netherlands. 3. Last season Leicester City and Bayern Munich won by 10 points and Paris Saint-Germain won by 31. Even if titles aren't decided in the last week, the top leagues are having much smaller average margins for their champions than last season.
France has been interesting this season. Obviously the 31 point gap last season greatly exaggerates the average margin among the top 7 leagues. If we take out that one outlier, then the average gap between first and second among the other top 7 leagues last season was about 5 points. It remains to be seen if Italy, England, Spain, Portugal, Russia or Germany will be any closer this season but so far the answer is leaning towards “No”. Also depends how you define a close race. A team could clinch the title 4 weeks before the end and then drop points in each of their last 4 matches (since they obviously have nothing to play for), thus making the title race seem closer than it really was when you look at the final table. Conversely you can have a close title race with 4 matches to go and then the top team just pulls away. For e.g., the title race in England was very close last season for the first 34 weeks, but then Leicester increased it by 5 points just in the final 4 matchdays making the final 10 point gap a bit misleading.
Adding up the margins in the top seven leagues and taking out the biggest margin each season gives a total of 34 points last season and 26 points this season. England, Spain, and Russia have their top two with an unequal amount of games. Spartak Moscow took a 10 point lead yesterday, which CSKA Moscow can reduce to 7 with their game in hand today.
I would expect that to increase. a) some first-place teams have a game-in-hand (= 6 points), b) Leipzig, Roma and Spurs have difficult fixtures on the horizon, so I don't expect them to remain as close as they are.