Eintracht Frankfurt's football playing style: mature!

One against five, one against five. Eintracht just lost again, again high, again in the Champions League. This time the opponents were Liverpool FC, but in October it basically didn’t matter what name was on the other striker’s shirt. They always score at least two goals against Frankfurt.

Markus Krösche, who selected the players for this squad, said a sentence after the game that changed the season: We finally have to improve. This is not unusual, after all Eintracht often (appropriately) boasts of having the youngest squad in the Bundesliga. Dan Krösche, Eintracht’s sporting director, is protective of his young players, whom he hopes to sell for a high price one summer.

Eintracht’s defense is improving

But now he’s had enough. It looked like Krösche was talking to a bastard. The players must approach the duel differently. Don’t let goals concede easily. Develop. Since then, no other team has scored two goals against Eintracht in one match, but in the last five matches. The defense is back. He has grown up.

This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

This happened because coach Dino Toppmöller decided in the same week to swap offensive players for defensive players. Eintracht now defends with five players, no longer with four. So he attacks with one less player. These are tactical details. But figuratively speaking it means: He has moved from the student dormitory to a rather boring suburb. He’s defended well, but his game hasn’t been exciting lately. You could also say: your teenage years are over.

Here too, he was often criticized for his juvenile defensiveness. And yes: they have one of the weakest defenses in the Bundesliga. He is still playing for the top spot in the league as he also plays one of the most exciting offensive styles in the league. A league where most people would rather defend than attack in a young and chaotic way.

Krösche probably didn’t mean by his words that Eintracht no longer plays forward. But in his adult games, he averaged just one goal. More recently, Frankfurt recorded the half of their history against Mainz: never before have two teams managed to score just once before the break.

Instead of the fun and anarchic youth style, Eintracht now plays men’s football. He has become more stable and has a good chance of progressing in the Champions League. And in the league they are in seventh place after a third of the season. But if he is to climb to the top of the rankings, as he did last season, he will need to remain calm at the back – and cause chaos again up front. Then he really has grown up.