In the last match before entering the winter break, Niko Kovac faced his former club Eintracht Frankfurt. In the German Super Cup duel at the beginning of this season, Frankfurt suffered a big defeat. However, since their last clash, many things changed.
Eintracht Frankfurt showed some impressing performances during the last weeks under Kovac’s successor Adi Hütter.
After a successful start, the German champion Bayern struggled to maintain their form and lost the first place to their rival Borussia Dortmund. Nevertheless, they improved their results in the last matches.
In this analysis, I am going to concentrate on Bayern’s weaknesses in possession and why the result didn’t tell us the whole story of this match.
Lineups
The approach of both teams was predictable. Frankfurt’s attacking phases were characterized by verticality, no matter where they won the ball. Especially target man Sebastien Haller and both wing-backs had an important role. In many cases, the Frenchman was the target for long balls out of his team’s back-line. His task was to control these balls, lay them off for supporting midfielders and the wing-backs attacked with aggressive runs down the flanks. The central midfielders then tried to find one of the wing-backs or Luka Jovic with passes into space.
Bayern tried to build up more patiently and progress into the opponent’s third with short passes mostly. However, they struggled progressing constantly into the opponent’s half in a well-structured way. The root of this problem was the space occupation of their midfield-three.
Defective space occupation
Especially in the first half, Bayern’s space occupation was terrible on many occasions. In my opinion, the biggest problem was their midfielders’ positioning. Often all of them came deep in order to help their teammates in build-up phases. However, this attracted too many opponents to press and constricted the space in their own third (P1).
It was even worse to see many players almost positioned in a line which is highly disadvantageous for the progress of the ball into more advanced areas. In P2, you can see all of Bayern’s midfielders coming deep and being positioned in a vertical line. This makes it easier for the opponent to defend. Furthermore, distant teammates don’t have enough quantity of support teammates instantly when they receive the ball. This leads to isolation of these players.
This kind of positioning was also apparent in more advanced areas of the pitch. The next example (P3.1 & P3.2) shows four players positioned in a line. Jovic’s cover shadow takes out three players and Thiago switches to David Alaba. There, Frankfurt can create numerical superiority easily. The left full back has to play back to the centre-back which interrupts the forward play.
