After the era of Thomas Schaaf, crowned with success, Werder struggled to escape from the battle against relegation. Several coaches were not able to fulfil the expectations and had to leave the club due to missing success.
However, Kohfeldt lets the supporters dream again as he was able to awake the offensive minded Werder Bremen one knows from the glory times. From a tactical point of view there are many parallels between Schaaf’s Werder and the one of Kohfeldt. But is Kohfeldt’s approach a promising one or is Werder stuck in an inevitable downward spiral?
The famous Werder diamond
Thomas Schaaf was one of the representatives of the 4-diamond-2 formation. When Kohfeldt took over, he established a system that resembles the midfield diamond in the possession phase.
He made use of the combinative skills of Max Kruse and gave him the role as a fluid playmaker. Actually, Werder deployed a 4-1-4-1 formation with Kruse as the striker. However, being in possession Kruse will drop situationally and leave the two wingers as strikers up top. This situationally creates a dynamic 4-diamond-2 as you can see above.
Style of play
In Werder’s 4-3-3, wingers and full-backs provide full width. With quick switches of play, Die Grün-Weißen attempt to either breakthrough on the flanks with overlapping runs of the full-backs or to exploit the created space in the center with deep runs of central midfielders. With four central players Werder Bremen causes problems for the opposition central midfield mostly containing only two or three players.
