The current situation for Borussia Dortmund and Augsburg before the first matchday of the new season couldn’t be more different. Lucien Favre’s team beat Bayern in the German Super Cup 2-0 and got away with a victory in the first round of the DFB Cup against Ürdingen. In addition, they bought with Mats Hummels, Nico Schulz, Julian Brandt and Thorgan Hazard – four incredible players. In light of this, it looks like Dortmund will have a real chance to win the Bundesliga. It would be the first time since the season 2011/12 that Bayern aren’t the champion of the Bundesliga.
On the other side, Augsburg had to make a radical change this season after the departures of important players like Kevin Danso, Jonathan Schmid, Ja-cheol Koo or Konstantinos Stafylidis. Besides, they lost their first competitive match against a club from the fourth German division called Verl in the first round of the DFB Cup.
So, everyone expected that the BVB will dominate the game with possession and Augsburg will sit back, try to avoid goalscoring opportunities for the opponent and try to score a goal with one of the few counter-attacks.
This tactical analysis will look at tactics of the two teams and uses statistics and analysis to examine how Dortmund was able to win 5-1.
Lineups
Martin Schmidt lined his team up in a 4-1-4-1 with their new goalkeeper Tomas Koubek between the sticks, and Mads Pedersen as well as Georg Teigl as full-backs. The central defence was made of another new signing Marek Suchý and the usual defensive midfielder Rani Khedira.
Carlos Gruezo played as the only number six and before him, the midfield four was made of Ruben Vargas, Daniel Baier, Michael Gregoritsch and André Hahn. Vargas is a 21-year-old left winger who joined Augsburg this summer from Luzern who really strived to show what he’s capable of. In some situations, it even got visible but since Dortmund dominated the game as we will see later on in this analysis, he almost had no chances to show his talent, but he could be an interesting player to watch this season. Florian Niederlechner was Augsburg’s only striker.
