While weve had a number of midfielders and attackers in the Austrian Bundesliga make a name for themselves after their departure to bigger leagues (for example Erling Haaland at Borussia Dortmund or Sadio Mané at Liverpool), it now seems that we have several interesting young defenders in Austria.
RB Salzburg have Maximilian Wöber, Jérôme Onguéné, and Rasmus Kristensen who are three young and talented defenders. The number of promising defensive talents is now becoming prominent in Austria. One of them is the 21-year-old Luca Meisl who plays for St. Pölten. At the end of this season, he will probably return to his parent club RB Salzburg since hes just on loan at St. Pölten, but they have an option to buy him at the end of this campaign.
In this tactical analysis scout report, we’ll take a look at the abilities of Meisl, his style of play and on what he needs to work on.
Usual positioning and reason for that
The young Austrian defender who played in the youth teams of RB Salzburg and for their second team FC Liefering before he joined St. Pölten on loan at the start of the season 2018/19, played in 64% of the time in the Austrian top-flight. Miesl is a centre-back who stands at 603 that is the average for a player in his position. He was also the captain of the team of RB Salzburg’s Under 19 side which won the 2017 UEFA Youth League what already tells you that he is one of the most promising Austrian centre-backs.
When we look at his heatmap below, we can see that the 21-year-old defender usually plays more on the right side of the back three in St. Pölten’s 3-4-1-2 which they mainly use. We can also see that he is positioned quite high for a centre-back, but we’ll take a closer look at his tactics and style of play in a different section of this tactical analysis.
The three centre-backs together with the two defensive midfielders are responsible for the circulation of the ball during the first stage of the build-up as we can see below. The two central midfielders are positioned quite deep to support the three defenders. However, one big question is if they switch the tactics or system in the future as the head coach Alexander Schmidt got sacked last weekend as they are currently in the last position of the Austrian Bundesliga. Since the team haven’t played under the new coach Robert Ibertsberger yet, I’ll focus on Meisl’s style of play and not that much on the role he played in his team’s tactics as they may change now.
Whether his new coach opts
