Football Season Guide

Last season started with a lot of promise for Wolfsburg but turned out to be a real disappointment. The club sacked coach Van Bommel after a series of bad results and his replacement Florian Kohfeldt didn’t fare much better, they eventually finished 12th and crashed out of Europe and the DFB Pokal early on. Kohfeldt was unsurprisingly moved on and replaced by Nico Kovac. The Croatian has an impressive CV, with previously successful spells at Eintracht Frankfurt and Bayern Munich, as well as coaching the Croatian national team between 2013 and 2015. Kovac has got to work building his squad during the summer with the club spending over 30 million on recruits. Going forward, Wolfsburg looks like they could cause problems, the signings of wingers Patrick Wimmer and Jakub Kaminski will add pace to the flanks and should provide assists for trio Jonas Wind, Lucas Nmecha, and Max Kruse. Xaver Schlager moving to Leipzig is a blow but the purchases of Mattias Svanberg and Bartol Franjic should help to compensate, in the midfield, they should be ok especially with Max Arnold and Aster Vranckx already a decent pairing. The defence was shaky in the last campaign and could be an area of weakness again. John Brooks has left so Lacroix and Bornauw will need to improve after some poor performances last season, van de Ven has so far been untested but could also help out. The full-back positions are set with Killian Fischer a good backup to Baku at right-back.