Within the last decade, RB Salzburg were the most dominant team in Austria and also qualified last season for the 2019/20 UEFA Champions League campaign(the first time an Austrian side was able to do so since Austria Vienna in 2013/14). However, within the last two years, LASK Linz became a serious challenger for the team of Jesse March.
Before Linz were able to really challenge the best team of Austria, the two capital clubs, Rapid Vienna and Austria Vienna, were always the teams who were sometimes able to offer competition to RB Salzburg.
In this recruitment analysis, we will look at LASK Linz’s activity on the transfer market within the last years to investigate how important the recruitment is for their success.
Development in the last years and overview
Before we now look at the statistics of their recruitment of the last seasons, we need to look at their performances to evaluate in which time it makes sense to analyse their activity on the transfer market.
Therefore, I visualised in the graph below their rankings within the last couple of seasons. Please note that the colours of the bars stand for the league level as blue (2012/13 and 2013/14) is the third Austrian division, green (2014/15 until 2016/17) is the second tier and red (2017/18 until today) is the Austrian Bundesliga. Additionally, I took for the current season which will restart in one week their position after the opening 22 matchdays.
We can perfectly see that they developed from year to years and always had a better final ranking than in the prior season. However, since The transfer activity of a club in the second league is different compared to one in the Austrian Bundesliga and because of this we would get mixed results if we look at the statistics for the last five years (for example), we will focus on their transfers from the summer transfer window of the season 2017/18 until to the winter transfer window of the current campaign.
In the following, when we talk about their arrivals, we wont include the players who return from a loan since these are in truth no new arrivals. Also, I used the data of Transfermarkt and I need to note here that there will be some players who were signed by LASK Linz and then moved to their second squad (Juniors OÖ). Also, there are several players who officially joined LASK from their second squad, but in truth still, only play for Juniors OÖ. In the first part of this recruitment analysis, we will include them in the statistics, but when we have a more detailed look at their current squad, we will see who really plays in the first team.
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