Austria’s Second Division 2019/20: Scouting young talents – data analysis

Within the last couple of years, the Austrian Bundesliga became a place where young talents gained experience and developed their skills to then join clubs in the bigger European leagues, especially in the Bundesliga. But what many people do not know is that many players who leave Austria to continue their career at a higher level, often made their first appearances on the senior level in Austria’s second division.

Especially FC Liefering (RB Salzburg’s second team), Austria Vienna II and Juniors OÖ (LASK Linz’s second team) have often quite interesting players in their squad as they implement youth players in their teams.

In this data analysis, we’ll try to identify the greatest talents (U22) in each position in Austrias second division and use data to show what makes them so special. We will start with the defenders, to then look at the central midfielders, wingers and as the final point, we use data to point out who the most promising central forwards of these league are. Since stats dont tell that much about a goalkeeper, I decided to not include this position in my research. Important note: all stats in this data analysis are for the games in Austria’s second division and are also the average values per 90 minutes.

Defenders

We will follow the same plan for each position as we firstly compare the values (which are important for the specific position) of the most promising U22 players and visualise them in a graph. After that, we will pick out two or three talented men who stood out in the graph and have a more detailed look at their stats.

For the defenders, our metrics which we use to identify the best players are successful defensive actions per 90 minutes and the success rate for defensive duels in percentage. In the graph below, we can see the best defenders of Austria’s second division according to these stats who are 21 years old or younger.

The 21 years-old Johannes Handl of Austria Vienna II is clearly the player who stands out in this graph with outstanding metrics as he wins 80% of his defensive duels and has 13.24 successful defensive actions per 90 minutes.

Clearly underneath him but still better than the remaining men are David Affengruber and David Bumberger. These two almost have identical stats as Affengruber wins 72.81% of his defensive duels and has 11.26 successful defensive actions per match while Bumberger has a success rate for def. duels of 72.41% and makes 11.25 successful defensive actions per 90 minutes. So, both men have similar values and also played a similar number of minutes in this season as Affengruer has 1678 while Bumberger played 1802 minutes for Juniors OÖ. Now, well take a closer look at the stats of these three young men.

Johann