Erling Haaland, Patson Daka and Shon Weissman are the three strikers who received in this season in the Austrian Bundesliga the most attention. While Haaland joined Borussia Dortmund in the winter of this season, Daka and Weissman are linked with several clubs in Ligue 1, Bundesliga and Serie A.
However, Taxiarchis Fountas showed also outstanding performances in this season and was one of the key players for the strong season of Rapid Vienna. The Greek central forward joined them in the summer of 2019 from St. Pölten. When he moved to Rapid Vienna in the summer of 2019 for free, he had a market value of £0.45M and at the end of the 2019/20 season, he is now worth £2.7M according to Transfermarkt showing his incredible season.
In this tactical analysis in the form of a scout report, we will look at the strengths and weaknesses of Fountas, his style of play and how he helps his team.
Positioning and movements
The two formations which got used mainly in this season by Dietmar Kühbauer were 4-2-3-1 and 3-5-2. Therefore, the Greek striker is used to systems with two forwards as well as being alone upfront. No matter if he is the lone striker or if he has a partner in the highest line, he does not just stay in the centre upfront as he is very mobile and likes to use his pace to get into different spaces. This can also be seen in his heatmap for all his Austrian Bundesliga games in the season 2020/21.
The Greek is for the tactics of Rapid Vienna really important as he tries to help his teammates in several areas on the pitch as we will see later again in this tactical analysis. Anyways, the aspect that he is often positioned in one of the two half-spaces is also because he often drifts out wide to create distance between himself and the opponents.
During the possession phase, he makes more frequently runs to quickly create passing lanes towards him to have little interplays while during the counter-attacks he often moves early to the wide-areas (often already during the defensive phase) to create distance between him and the opponent already ahead of receiving the ball. An example of that can be seen below as intelligently moves to the left half-space during a moment of offensive transition to create space between him and Philipp Wiesinger.
