Nico

🇪🇸🧠 Albert Riera: "My first month as Frankfurt manager? It's been very intense... firstly, the psychology, because I think the team was low mentally, which is normal. After a period of 13 games, winning only one game, every team in the world would be low mentally." "I was focused on waking them up because player confidence is very powerful. Then, I knew I had quality players, I knew they have a lot of capacity, but they were a bit blocked at that moment. I needed to unblock them. After that, I think you could already see the players’ body language – they looked a bit bigger and taller because they now had more confidence." "After that, it was the concept of football. We needed to see a team, and this is my target, that when I see a team playing, I see my character, my personality, and what I am teaching them during the week. You can see a very serious team off the ball with a very clear concept of defending, and yet a team that is also desperate to recover the ball as soon as possible." "Also, we want to have a lot of ideas on the ball. We can surprise the opponent with these three different ways of playing, because you can’t play the same way all the time. In football, we have a lot of information, and a lot of possibilities to analyse the opponent. Then, we need to surprise them, which is why we need to work in different ways." "Now, we are undertaking this process that when we’re on the ball, we can surprise our opponent every week." (Bundesliga)