At FC Augsburg, daily work is now different than it was recently. The players welcome the change.
Things are moving quickly in the first few days of Augsburg’s training camp, and not just because of the windy weather. By Monday at the latest, coach Sandro Wagner had tightened the reins, splitting the large group into two. And as the players took turns on the pitches and crossed paths, they exchanged a strained “Have fun” with each other.
SpVgg Unterhaching already got a taste of the intensity of Wagner’s training back then, with president Manni Schwabl recently describing the first winter under the current Augsburg coach to the as “brutal pig training.”
No FCA professional has put it so bluntly, but the effort is evident in the players, who are well aware that summer training as a Bundesliga professional has to look like this.
Nevertheless, the training is different, if only because there is always something new waiting for the players at the edge of the main pitch, something they have now become accustomed to. “I didn’t know this before, but I see it as very positive,” says Phillip Tietz, for example, about the XXL video wall brought in specially from Augsburg.
The coaching team’s €100,000 aid measures around seven by four meters and is used by Wagner and his colleagues not only to show game footage, but also to display mundane things such as positions on the pitch or who is playing in which team during which exercise. Or a countdown to the mini-tour at the end of the day.
The primary purpose of the LED wall is, of course, to avoid having to conduct video analysis in the auditorium and instead move it onto the pitch. This means that the players first learn behind closed doors what went well and why, and what didn’t and why, before going over it again in detail on the pitch. “Normally,” says Tietz, “you do the video analysis before training and then forget one or two details. When we go into tactics on the pitch, he can play back the scenes and you know immediately what you did wrong and what you can do better.” The bottom line is that the striker finds it “extremely beneficial.”
Captain Jeffrey Gouweleeuw also considers the new acquisition “very practical”: “The coach can show scenes that were good and what he would like to see done differently. And he can do that right there on the pitch.”
In 2017, TSG Hoffenheim, under current national coach Julian Nagelsmann, was the first Bundesliga club to work with a video wall at its training ground. One of Nagelsmann’s players at the time was Sandro Wagner.
