Shon Weissman is currently the best goalscorer in the Austrian Bundesliga and also tops the list when we add assists to the equation.
In 20 appearances, he scored an impressive figure of 20 goals and provided three assists.
The Israeli joined Wolfsberger AC at the start of this season from Maccabi Haifa for free and missed just one game out of the 22 matches in the Austrian Bundesliga.
Wolfsberg did an outstanding job as they brought in their best forward and the most valuable player of the whole squad without paying Maccabi Haifa a single dime.
In this tactical analysis in the form of a scout report, we’ll take a closer look at the qualities and tactics of Weissman to understand why he is so important to his team.
Shon Weissman Positioning and movements
Basically, Wolfsberger AC is one of the few teams in the Austrian Bundesliga which stay within their preferred formation.
While it is usual in Austria’s top-flight that teams often switch between systems with a back three and a back four, the team of the new head coach Ferdinand Feldhofer (he took over after Gerhard Struber’s move to EFL Championship club Barnsley) always exclusively used the 4-3-1-2 formation under Struber and are doing the same thing under Feldhofer.
In this system, some players play in almost every game, and as a result, the mechanisms and patterns function perfectly as they know each other so well.
Lukas Schmitz (left-back), Michael Liendl (offensive midfielder), Mario Leitgeb (defensive midfielder), Michael Novak (right-back) and Weissman (forward) are, for example, five players who only missed 178 of the 1890 possible minutes in this season.
As we can see in Weissman’s heatmap below for his 20 appearances this season, the Israeli is usually the right striker in the 4-3-1-2 system.
In the first part of the season until the winter break, Anderson Niangbo was his partner in almost every single game.
However, RB Salzburg ended his loan at Wolfsberger AC in the winter transfer window to then sell him to KAA Gent.
In the three Bundesliga games after the winter break, Alexander Schmidt was the second forward on two occasions while Cheikhou Dieng was his partner once.
Before we now take a closer look at Weissman’s style of play in this tactical analysis, it’s safe to say that his strength is clearly not to get that much involved in the build-up and drop deeper to get on the ball.
The 24-year-old forward focuses on his main task, which is creating something dangerous in the final third.
