The 40-year-old Sandro Schwarz is heading into his third season as the head coach of Mainz 05. The finished the last two seasons in the 14th and 12th position. Even though they lost their star Jean-Philippe Gbamin who joined Everton for a reported fee of £22.5 million, they have a young and talented squad.
Theyll face Kaiserslautern on 10 August 2019 in the first round of the DFB Cup and play on the first matchday of the upcoming Bundesliga season away against Freiburg. These are two doable tasks and especially against Kaiserslautern, everyone expects Mainz to go through to the next round.
This tactical analysis in the form of a season preview will look at the squad of Mainz and use their pre-season friendlies to predict how they might play in this upcoming season.
Squad and system
Beside Gbamin also the likes of Anthony Ujah, Giulio Donati, Gaëtan Bussmann and Gerrit Holtmann, and some other less important players left the club. Furthermore, René Adler and Niko Bungert both retired from football.
However, Mainz signed seven new players with an average age of 21.86 years and they paid all combined just £18.5 million while they received in total for their sales £24.3 million and so made until now £5.8 million profit. Of course, its hard to replace a player like the Ivorian Gbamin but Mainz spent it wisely on several young talents instead of buying one big name.
Heres their current squad which has got an average age of 23.9 years and currently contains 29 players but its still possible that some players leave or join the club. The players are ranked in each position after their current market value from the highest to the lowest:
Goalkeepers: Florian Müller, Robin Zentner, Omer Hanin, Finn Dahmen
Centre-backs: Moussa Niakhaté, Stefan Bell, Alexander Hack, Ahmet Gürleyen
Full-backs and wing-backs: Aarón Martín, Ronaël Pierre-Gabriel, Daniel Brosinski, Phillipp Mwene, Jonathan Meier
Central midfielders: Pierre Kunde Malong, Edimilson Fernandes, Jean-Paul Boëtius, Danny Latza, Ridle Baku, Alexandru Maxim, José Rodríguez, Leandro Barreiro Martins
Wingers: Levin Öztunali, Karim Onisiwo
Strikers: Jean-Philippe Mateta, Robin Quaison, Dong-won Ji, Jonathan Burkardt, Cyrill Akono, Aaron Seydel
They used during their pre-season friendlies mainly a 4-3-1-2 formation and just in the game against Metz a 4-3-2-1 formation. In light of this, we can expect that Schwarz will prefer the 4-3-1-2 system during the upcoming season what is understandable since there are several good central midfielders in the squad and just two skilled wingers with Öztunali and Onisiwo.
Build-up
It is sure to say that Bell and Niakhaté will be the two starters in the central defence. These two played during last season 25 and 33 respectively games in the Bundesliga and this season wont be much different. The two centre-backs are together with the three central midfielders responsible for the build-up.
The three central midfielders should always provide short passing lanes to keep possession. The two full-backs push up to provide width. Due to the narrow positioning of the three central midfielders and the offensive midfielder, the opposition often defends with a narrow block. In these situations, the full-backs have got a lot of space. However, another reason for their wide positioning is to stretch the opposition and create distance between the opponents in the centre which is vital for Mainzs tactics as we will see later in this analysis.
