Bo Svensson Tactics At FC Liefering 2019/2020 – Tactical Analysis

Peter Zeidler, who is now the head coach at St. Gallen in Switzerland, and Gerhard Struber, who has been the head coach of Barnsley in the EFL Championship since, are the only two coaches who have worked at FC Liefering, the second team of RB Salzburg, in recent years.

Oliver Glasner, who is the head coach in the Bundesliga of Wolfsburg for the first time this season, also worked there as an assistant coach.

Additionally, the likes of Alexander Zickler, Franz Schiemer, and René Aufhauser also worked there as assistant coaches.

This already shows us that within the last few years, several interesting head and assistant coaches worked there and then went on to become successful elsewhere or at RB Salzburg.

The Dane Bo Svensson has been the head coach of FC Liefering since the summer of 2019.

Although we know that they also employ the RB philosophy, this tactical analysis will focus on Bo Svenssons tactics and style of play.

Bo Svensson Style Of Play

It should come as no surprise that Lieferings tactics reflect the basic principles of the Red Bull Group philosophy: they want to attack primarily through the centre and play in a vertical style.

We will look at this later in more detail in this tactical analysis, but it also explains at least a bit why the Danish coach lines his team up mainly in a 4-3-1-2 and a 4-4-2 diamond, respectively.

There’s no real difference between them, but one can call it one way, and others can call it the other.

The Dane is just 40 years old, which is still quite young for a coach, but since Liefering is a kind of second team and the U23s of RB Salzburg, he has only young talents in his squad.

Due to that, there is still a huge age gap between the players and the coach.

According to Transfermarkt, the average age of Liefering’s 25 players is 18.28 years old.

Also, the goalkeeper and captain, Daniel Antosch, is the only player who has been part of the squad since 2017, while all other players got added to the team in 2018, 2019, or 2020.

This indicates that, for the majority of players, it serves as the stepping stone between the youth teams of Salzburg and the first team of the Bullen.

However, not all players are from Salzburgs youth academy, as they sometimes also bring in young talent from other countries.

For example, in the summer of 2019, RB Salzburg bought three 16-year-olds from Switzerland, Slovenia, and Denmark, then loaned them to Liefering.

Since Svensson’s team are not officially the second squad of Salzburg but a so-called cooperation club, they can move players between the clubs as they want.

Next, we will take a closer look at Bo Svenssons tactics to see how he allows his young men to play on the pitch.

Bo Svensson Build-up

Basically, Liefering are rarely the team that really dominates the game (on average 50.2% possession) as they also sit back beside their press to lure out the opposition to have more space for the counter-attacks.

When they have the ball, they want to have a clean progression of the ball by using short passes.

They stay in their 4-3-1-2 formation and the back four positions wide.

So the full-backs hug the touchline while the centre-backs also position a bit wider.

The three central midfielders stay in front of them during the first stage to maintain a numerical advantage.

Due to that, even when the opposition is pressing in at them, the young talents stay calm and try to use short passes and intelligent movements to support each other and to pass their way free.

As shown in the example below, the right midfielder, Luka Sučić, supports the right-back, Wallison.

After a little interplay between these two, the passing lane towards the left centre-back David Affengruber opens up, and Wallison plays the ball over.

Affengruber can then easily pass the ball to the left-back to exploit the free space on the other wing.

Considering the example above, their calmness is often quite remarkable, especially given their average age of 18.28.

However, some of them have the potential to play at the highest level in Austria and possibly elsewhere as well, and they prove it in such moments by remaining calm and resolving the situation.

As in the example ab