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As a permanent champion, Red Bull Salzburg is used to succeeding. On Tuesday, the “Bulls” continued their series as “Team of the Year.” In the election held by the Austrian Association of Sports Journalists, Salzburg were the first team to win this title for the third time in a row. The achievements of the last twelve months speak for themselves.
The highlight was undoubtedly the first-time qualification for the 2019/20 Champions League, secured by the fixed place for the Austrian champions. The “concert of the greats” turned out to be a spectacle for Salzburg, which took a respectable third place in a group with defending champions Liverpool, SSC Napoli and KRC Genk. In addition, there was the explosive development of the spectacular striker Erling Haaland, who scored 16 goals in the League and 8 in the Champions League before leaving Borussia Dortmund.
In the league, the team of American Jesse Marsch, who inherited Marco Rose, had to go through a certain slump in the summer of 2019, LASK seemed at times on the verge of breaking the dominance of Salzburg. At the end of the regular round, the “Bulls” were suddenly six points behind the Linzers, who melted to at least three due to the halving of points. But thanks to the misstep of LASK’s Corona, which subsequently weakened, Dominik Szoboszlai and company recovered in time and finally held the seventh championship en suite in late June. The seventh cup title in the last nine years had already been secured a month earlier.
It is currently hard to imagine anything changing in the Salzburg supremacy in 2020/21. The foundations of the current Bundesliga leaders are now too strong and the battleship hardly seems to be off course. In the previous season alone, UEFA bonuses generated around € 35 million, while sales from Haaland and Co. brought another € 115 million to the club’s coffers. In light of this, they even allowed valuable transfers from Maximilian Wöber (summer) and Noah Okafor (winter) last season, which set all-time highs in the league with rumored sums of around € 10 million and € 11 million respectively.
With this force they left behind the “curse” of the CL classification in autumn 2020, they prevailed in the play-off to Maccabi Tel Aviv and they returned to catch very attractive rivals: the reigning champions Bayern Munich and Atlético de Madrid, flanked by the Lok Moscow. In the first three games it was enough to reach a point, hope at least in third place and the change to the Europa League, in which they reached the semifinals in 2018, but he lives.
