Ahead of the first leg, this was clearly one of the ties that people were most looking forward to as both RB Salzburg and Eintracht Frankfurt are among the best teams in the round of the last 32 in the UEFA Europa League. However, the first match in Frankfurt was not as tight as expected and Salzburg lost 4-1 away from home. Due to that, it already seemed clear, before the second leg even started, who would go through to the round of the last 16.
In this tactical analysis, we’ll look at both teams’ tactics and explain how Eintracht Frankfurt were able to get a 2-2 away from home to get through to the round of the last 16 in the UEFA Europa League.
Lineups
Jesse Marsch lined his team up in maybe the most offensive formation possible. Cican Stankovic was the goalkeeper while the back four in front of him consisted of Albert Vallci, André Ramalho, Jérôme Onguéné and captain Andreas Ulmer. Mohamed Camara was the only defensive midfielder while he was supported in the centre by Dominik Szoboszlai and Enock Mwepu. In front of them, Patson Daka, Hee-chan Hwang and Sekou Koita were quite flexible.
On the other side, Adi Hütter lined his team up in a 4-1-4-1 formation which was quite fluid as we’ll see in the upcoming sections of this tactical analysis. Kevin Trapp was between the sticks while the back four was made of Evan N’Dicka, David Abraham, Martin Hinteregger and Almamy Touré. Stefan Ilsanker was the only defensive midfielder while in front of him Sebastian Rode and Djibril Sow occupied the middle of the pitch. Filip Kostić and Daichi Kamada were the wingers and André Silva was the only striker upfront.
RB Salzburg’s build-up against the high press of Frankfurt
In general, we saw a game in which Salzburg needed and wanted to score as fast as possible to keep the chance alive after the 4-1 defeat in the first leg and due to that, they played as active, offensive and vertical as always. On the other side, Eintracht Frankfurt’s central goal was to avoid that Salzburg would even get into some kind of flow and dont let them play their usual style of play. Due to that, Frankfurt used a high pressing system but also sat back deeper in their narrow 4-1-4-1 formation to give Salzburg no space in the centre.
Meanwhile, Marsch’s team stayed pretty much in their 4-diamond-2 formation during the build-up. The full-backs pushed a bit forward while the centre-backs were together with the defensive midfielder, Camara, responsible for the circulation of the ball during the first stage of the build-up. However, one of Frankfurts biggest goals was that they wanted to take Camara out of the game as soon as possible and created in the first half a kind of a diamond around him which consisted of the striker, Silva and the three central midfielders Rode, Sow and Ilsanker. As soon as the ball was played to him, they immediately put pressure on him to win the ball as we can see in the example below.
