Augsburg vs TSG Hoffenheim

Two teams that struggled to impress last season will lock horns at the WWK Arena this weekend as Augsburg take on TSG Hoffenheim in their 2021/22 Bundesliga curtain-raiser.

Last season’s 13th-place finished made sure Augsburg will embark on their 11th successive Bundesliga campaign since making their competition debut in 2011/12. But the ‘Fuggerstädter‘ have established themselves as typically slow starters, as witnessed by a return of seven defeats in ten Bundesliga openers across the past decade (W2, D1). On the bright side, though, Augsburg painted the beginning of last season with flying colors, racking up a three-game unbeaten Bundesliga start (W2, D1), their best-ever in the top-flight. Before winning this exact fixture 2-1 in 2020/21, Augsburg had been on a five-match losing home league streak against Hoffenheim, drawing a blank three times in the process. That abovementioned triumph was, in fact, a part of Augsburg’s strong finish to last season that saw them lose just one of the final six Bundesliga outings (W3, D2).

On the other hand, a run of seven Bundesliga matches without defeat (W3, D4) to conclude the 2020/21 campaign masked Hoffenheim’s underwhelming season that resulted in a disappointing 14th-place finish. Interestingly, though, each of their three victories during that abovementioned seven-game streak saw TSG come from behind to claim all three points. But the visitors’ Bundesliga away form last term paints a worrying picture as they failed to win any of the ten top-flight trips they started as favorites (D7, L3). Indeed, heading into the new campaign, ‘Die Kraichgauer‘ are winless in eight Bundesliga road trips in a row (D5, L3). During that sequence, Sebastian Hoeneß’s men failed to score more than once per game on seven occasions, with a 2-2 draw at Borussia Dortmund in mid-February the solitary exception.