Eintracht Frankfurt Continue to Impress With Attractive Style of Play

Eintracht Frankfurt are impressing fans, coaches and peers with their achievements this season.

The picture of Eintracht celebrating following the DFB Cup victory against Bayern Munich last season is still fresh in many people’s minds. Not only did Frankfurt beat the reigning champion as an “underdog”, they also punched their ticket to this season’s UEFA Europa League . And they’ve not wasted it, having emerged unbeaten from the group stage and marched into the quarter finals.

Under head coach Adi Hütter the Eagles play an exciting, attack-minded brand of football that has led to a successful season. The Austrian, who previously held the reins as coach of Young Boys in Bern and FC Red Bull Salzburg, has continued the success of his predecessor Niko Kovac, even though Hütter leads the team in a more attacking direction.

Still remembered well: The celebrations of Eintracht after the DFB Cup final against FC Bayern Munich last season. Photo: Eintracht Frankfurt Fußball AG

Attractive, Inspiring Football

However, this does not mean sticking to one style of play at any cost and leaving his team one dimensional: “I did not want that, but to teach my team a different style,” he recently explained in an interview with the Frankfurt Neue Presse. “I said right at the beginning, I want to play attractive and inspiring football, but also be versatile.”

This brought the Bundesliga star Hütter respect and attention beyond the national borders of Germany. Eintracht is the last remaining German team competing in European competition this season. As of April 2019, they are among the last 8 in the UEFA Europa League and are deep in the hunt for Champions League qualification thanks to a fantastic run of form in the Bundesliga.

For years, the Eagles have also been supervised by athletic trainer Martin Spohrer , who pays close attention to the training load and fitness of his players by using the Firstbeat Sports System. “We use the Firstbeat system for real-time monitoring to provide trainers with information about intensity and game workload. Also, in the post-workout analysis, I mainly look at TRIMP and the training effect to get information about the strain on the players and the effectiveness of the training,” explains Spohrer.

Frankfurt’s injury statistics speak to the work Sprohrer is doing. According to analysis by fussballverletzungen.de they had the fifth fewest injuries amongst Bundesliga clubs after the first stages of the current season.

New Dimensions in Stress Management

The TRIMP (Training Impulse) analysis doesn’t only make a statement about the current training load of a player. Following the latest update to Firstbeat Sports, acute and chronic training load are now directly compared. Thus, optimized training planning and injury risk management are possible. For each player, the values are also scaled individually, so that player potential can really be effectively identified and retrieved.

Here you can learn more about the background and the application of the Acute vs. Chronic training load feature.

In concrete terms, the new Acute Vs. Chronic training load metric gives an indication of each player’s current injury risk. Thus, the proven TRIMP, which Martin Spohrer also uses in training, is extended by more than just one dimension, because the ratio of acute and chronic training load is available directly after each workout in the dashboard of Firstbeat Sports – ready for the training planning of the upcoming days and weeks.

The Eagles from Frankfurt still have some big challenges ahead of them this season. But Adi Hütter’s team is fit, motivated and sitting in a great position in the table. We’re looking forward to the next images of a jubilant Eintracht! 

Header image: Jan Hübner, Foto Hübner

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