RB Salzburg are clearly the most dominant team in the Austrian Bundesliga with the likes of LASK Linz, Wolfsberger AC and Rapid Vienna being behind them. These are also the teams who represented Austria within the last couple of seasons in the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Europe League. However, a few years ago, Austria Vienna were also among the very best teams of Austrias first-tier and besides, they were the last team to not let RB Salzburg win the league as they got to the top of the Austrian Bundesliga in 2012/13. Since then, of course, Salzburg were crowned champions every year. Still, Austria Vienna are at the moment clearly far away from the top teams in the Austrian Bundesliga. Currently, they are in the seventh position after the opening 22 games and therefore wont even be in the championship play-offs (the first six teams qualify for it).
In this recruitment analysis, we will have a detailed look at Austria Vienna’s signings within the last five seasons to investigate if probably their activity on the transfer market is one of the reasons for their current bad situation and also look at the leagues where they could probably start scouting and recruiting from.
Recruitment in the last five seasons
Firstly, we want to get a basic overview of the recruitment of Austria Vienna within the last couple of years. For this, we look at the done deals within the last five seasons. Considering this, all players who joined them on loan or signed a permanent deal with the club since the summer transfer window of 2015/16 will show up in this analysis (the goalkeeper Ammar Helac who joins them in the upcoming summer from Blau-Weiß Linz will not be included). Also, players who returned from a loan arent counted as new arrivals and besides, I will take the signings in the summer and winter together per season to have a better overview.
In the first graph below, we can see the number of signed players, their average age and how many of them are still at the club.
They signed in the last five years 59 players (14 on loan and 45 on a permanent deal) and 32 of them are still with the club. At this stage, I need to mention that Kevin Friesenbichler is in this list three times as he was on loan at the club twice and then joined them on a permanent deal. Also, Christoph Martschinko was on loan once before signing a permanent deal with the Veilchen and joining them from Bundesliga club Hoffenheim. Due to that, in truth 56 men joined them, which is a quite high number for five seasons.
Furthermore, not all of the 32 players who are still with the club are playing for the first team as two are at other clubs on loan and some of them play mainly or exclusively for their second side. With an overall average age of 22.59, we can see that they mainly sign young talents, but in the next graph we will find out the main reason for this low number as then we will see how many talents they added from their own second team to the first squad. In the image below, we can see from which countries they signed the players within the last five seasons.
