The tactics of Frankfurt defy the “Farmer’s League”

Despite the whole of Football Twitter stating that the Bundesliga is a farmer’s league, Bayern Munich started the weekend only five points in front of RB Leipzig with a tough away game to in-form Eintract Frankfurt; who were unbeaten in their last 10 games and had lost only once in 16 before facing their opponents (since that 5–0 thrashing from Munich). What Bayern didn’t know that they could well be only two points behind RBL by the end of the Sunday.

That run for Frankfurt has seen them boost up the league quite comfortably in the Champions League spots. Consistency has been the battle they’ve won that the other teams within the league has lost and partly down to Adi Hütter’s relentlessness to stick to his philosophy and tactics, against Bayern we saw a similar thing.

Defending forward

Their general defensive set up is usually with a back 3/5, which allows basically every player on the pitch to follow their opponent. High pushing wing-backs and wide-shifting half backs is what you typically see under Hütter; this makes it easy for the whole team to press higher up the pitch.

On top of this, they use a man-marking approach to help the process of isolating their opponents in wide-zones. Their general passing trigger is the very common “pass to the full back”, whenever…