RB Salzburg were in the last years clearly the dominant force in Austria as they won the Austrian Bundesliga every year since the season 2013/14 and were, in this season, in the UEFA Champions League for the first time in the history of the club. There, they showed great performances in the group stage against Liverpool, Napoli and Genk.
One of the trademarks of Salzburg is clearly that every year they would look to have an almost completely new squad. They sell players to bigger European clubs in every transfer window and then build a new team with young talents. In almost every area of the squad, you can see new faces after at least two years time.
However, in one certain position that is not the case as the left-back Andreas Ulmer has already been a part of RB Salzburg since January 2009. The 34-year-old has since then been an important part of the team and one of the very few players who stayed for a longer time.
However, he wont be able to play on his current level for that many more years. Even though RB Salzburg have a great replacement in Gideon Mensah who is currently on loan at Zulte Waregem, they should stil look for an alternative for two reasons. Firstly, there is no single real left-back in the squad of FC Liefering (RB Salzburgs second team) and secondly, it would be really risky to have just one left-back in the squad as soon as Ulmer ends his career or leaves the club.
Due to that, this data analysis will look into who could be the second replacement next to Mensah for Ulmer at RB Salzburg.
What to expect from a left-back at RB Salzburg
Before we even start this data analysis, we have to first look at the tactics of the team of Jesse Marsch and what you should expect from a left-back at the Austrian champions.
Basically, the philosophy of the club is to be very active with and without the ball. Especially the two phases of transition are key moments for the Austrian side. As soon as they win back the ball, they try to start a counter-attack and get forward as fast as possible while they mostly immediately start a counter-pressing when they lose possession.
When they are out of possession, the squad of Marsch mainly use a high and aggressive pressing to give the opposition no chance to have a calm build-up. It’s no surprise that they have the lowest PPDA (passes per defensive action) value of all clubs in the Austrian Bundesliga with 5.56. Also, the fact that their value for the challenge intensity (tackles, duels and interceptions per minutes of the opposition’s possession) is the highest in the league with 9.2 shows us what an active style of play they have.
In possession, the full-backs and wing-backs respectively are the only ones who provide any width. The American head coach prefers a 4-4-2 or a 3-5-2 formation. When they play with a back four, the two wingers tuck in to occupy the half-spaces and that means that the full-backs are the only players on the wings.
Considering this, no matter if they play with three or four men at the back, in the periods of possession the full-backs are quite important since they have to push forward and support the midfielders and attackers.
Since Salzburg overloads the centre and the half-spaces often, the opposition defends quite narrow and stay horizontally compact. Due to that, Salzburg either want to break through the middle with the combination of short passes and deep runs or try to exploit the space on the wings with the aid of the full-backs.
Considering the basic tactical ideas of RB Salzburg, the left-back needs to be physically strong, have solid stamina and should have good technical abilities since they are quite often involved in the build-up and the attacks. We’ll now have a quick look at Ulmer’s stats to compare them to the other left-backs.
Andreas Ulmer’s metrics
Little note: In the graph above and in all the following ones as well as in the text, we always talk about the average values per 90 minutes.
As mentioned in the section above, you expect from a left-back in the philosophy of Salzburg that he supports his teammates in the advanced areas. Two metrics with which we can simply show how often and active a player is when it comes to the offensive phase are progressive runs and progressive passes. Salzburg’s captain Ulmer has quite good values for both categories with 1.54 progressive runs and 14.68 progressive passes.
However, an of
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