Christian Ilzer's perfect mix working wonders at high-flying Hoffenheim
From relegation candidates to UEFA Champions League hopefuls and perhaps even Bundesliga title contenders, Hoffenheim have been transformed under Christian Ilzer this season. We examine the reasons why.
“In five years’ time, I want to be playing for the title,” said Ilzer in a German media interview in March 2025, barely four months after replacing Pellegrino Matarazzo. It was a bold statement. All the more so given he had picked up just four wins since being appointed and his team were looking more like relegation candidates than title challengers.
There may have even been a few smirks, certainly among the press, perhaps even among players, especially when the 2024/25 season ended in 15th place, just three points above the relegation play-off spot.
But with Ilzer taking his third-placed team to the Allianz Arena on Sunday with a chance to close the gap on league leaders Bayern to six points, having won all five league games in 2026, the last laugh looks like being his.
“Above all, Chris has got everyone working without the ball,” said Hoffenheim’s Andreas Schicker, who won the 2023/24 double working with Ilzer at Sturm Graz in Austria. “It starts from the front when you see how Tim Lemperle is working so hard. But I could mention any of the players behind him too.”
Watch: Can Hoffenheim topple leaders Bayern?
With 23 goals conceded – the third-best defensive record in the league and 17 fewer than they had shipped at the same stage last season – Ilzer’s unconventional 4-2-2-2 formation is clearly working. They lie joint-fourth in the Bundesliga for https://www.bundesliga.com/en/bundesliga/stats/clubs/duels-won, and though their aggressive strategy has led them to commit the most fouls - with Lemperle leading the league individually - they are also top in sprints and intensive runs, the latter by almost 1,000 ahead of a Bayern side lauded for their workrate in second.
Summer arrival Vladimir Coufal is the embodiment of Ilzer’s industry-focused philosophy. The Czech Republic international is the individual league leader in both sprints and intensive runs’ as well as distance covered. In fact, Coufal has been so good that after the 3-1 win over Heidenheim on Matchday 8, even the opposition coach had to mention his performance.
"If I could single out one Hoffenheim player, I'd choose the right-back,” said Frank Schmidt of Coufal, who was brought in on a free transfer as a replacement for compatriot Pavel Kadeřábek only because Valentin Gendrey sustained a serious injury. “The energy he brought to the pitch today, the way he defended going forward, the way he tackled – we'll look at how we can match that."
If Coufal has been everywhere on the pitch, goalkeeper Oliver Baumann has been in the same place as he has been for the last 12 years: between the posts. The 35-year-old former Freiburg man became the 14th player to reach 500 Bundesliga games in late November – all but 131 of those came for the Sinsheim outfit – and the Germany international has been as reliable as ever. No other goalkeeper in the top half of the Bundesliga table had saved as many shots (63) as Baumann after 20 games. By contrast, Bayern’s Manuel Neuer had stopped just 24.
“He’s totally underrated,” said Germany coach Julian Nagelsmann, who worked with Baumann in his first senior coaching role at Hoffenheim and looks highly likely to take him to the FIFA World Cup in June. “He’s a goalkeeper who has never been on the radar of big clubs, but he would have totally deserved to be.”
Watch: The best of Oliver Baumann
The context of those impressive stats adds still more lustre to the club’s achievements this season. There were 10 new arrivals and 22 – that’s twenty-two! – departures in the summer as a bloated squad was ruthlessly but surgically trimmed to give Ilzer a compact group he could work wonders with. Their win over Werder Bremen in their rescheduled Matchday 16 win, which saw Ilzer’s side play at the Weserstadion with 10 men for almost 40 minutes, is testament to their unity.
But it didn’t gel immediately. Two wins and three defeats from the opening six league games of the campaign was soon followed by a DFB Cup exit in late October. But since Matchday 6 and a 1-0 home loss to Cologne, Hoffenheim have been beaten just once as Ilzer quickly found the combination required to fit so many new faces into a cohesive unit.
Watch: Bremen 0-2 Hoffenheim - highlights
“What Christian Ilzer and Andreas Schicker did in the summer is unbelievable,” said veteran forward Andrej Kramarić. “I must say, I think it’s the best squad that we have had at Hoffenheim in the last 10 years. It’s a top team, top quality, a lot of potential, a lot of young players, a lot of experience. It’s the perfect mix.”
The Croatia international, who played his 300th Bundesliga game earlier this season for the club he joined in January 2015, is another of the key reasons his team are flourishing. The 34-year-old moved to eight goals for the campaign – and into third place on the Bundesliga’s all-time foreign-born goalscorers list – with his double against Union Berlin on Matchday 20.
“His quality speaks for itself,” said Ilzer in December of the 2018 World Cup runner-up, who has reached double figures for goals in all but one of his full Bundesliga seasons prior to 2025/26. “He’s a top pro and works tirelessly on his talent in detail. He’s an example for us all, for the whole team.”
Watch: Hoffenheim 3-1 Union Berlin - highlights
His teammates have followed his lead and currently sit behind only Bayern in the goalscoring charts on 43, which is just three fewer than they scored in 34 games last season.
“I’m very happy, everything’s going great, we’re playing top football,” said Kramarić after the Matchday 20 win over Union. “It wasn’t easy to win challenges against Union, but in the end we had a little luck and we once again showed the kind of football this team has been playing this year.”
“No one would have thought that of us before the season – perhaps not even ourselves,” admitted Schicker, who joined Hoffenheim in October 2024 and was instrumental in bringing Ilzer in. “The boys are doing really well week after week. I already had a good feeling in the training camp in July that the boys liked being together, that’s always a good sign. Last season we experienced something different, but we don’t want to look back on that.”
So the outlook is forward and the question now is whether Ilzer’s ambition of turning his side into genuine title contenders can be realised this season. A sixth win in their 37th Bundesliga meeting with Bayern would go some way to answering that, even if the Hoffenheim coach has – in public at least – toned down his rhetoric since March last year.
“When we spoke back then, the challenge was to manage a crisis effectively. At that point, you have to mentally distance yourself from that crisis. It's equally important now to manage a successful period effectively and focus on what's important,” he explained to media.
"Ultimately, the only thing that will help us is to make the most of every single training session so that we can deliver our strongest performance on the pitch on Sunday."
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