What To Expect From Lustrinelli’s Union Berlin

Following a tumultuous 2025-26 season, 1. FC Union Berlin will enter the 2026-27 Bundesliga season with Mauro Lustrinelli as their Head Coach. The highly sought-after former Switzerland international made history as manager of FC Thun, bringing the club its first ever Super League title, doing so as a promoted team.

Having never managed outside of Switzerland, and only spending one season outside his home country as a player (for Sparta Prague in 2006-07), Lustrinelli is making a huge step in his career. Will he be able to cope with the additional demands of coaching in a top league, with a packed out 22,000 capacity stadium? Here, we will explore how he will set his new team up tactically in the hopes of bringing Union back to European competition.

To understand what Lustrinelli needs to do, let’s discuss the situation he is inheriting as Head Coach.

Union finished 11th in the Bundesliga in 2025-26, which was an improvement on the previous season but overall pretty uninspiring. The “old-school” Steffen Baumgart, at the helm since January 2025, was removed in April as Union began to accept their mid-table fate again, with just two wins in 14 games after the winter break. At the time, Union were in 11th place, seven points clear of the relegation playoff position but ten points away from qualifying for Europe. Baumgart’s interim replacement, Marie-Louise Eta, saw out the season with two wins, a draw and two losses, becoming the first ever woman to coach (and win matches) in one of Europe’s top five leagues.

In comes Lustrinelli, following in the steps of Union’s most successful manager. Fellow Swiss coach Urs Fischer - in charge of Thun from 2013 to 2015 - signed for Union ahead of the 2018-19 season following back-to-back titles with FC Basel during the intermittent years. Fischer also qualified Thun for the 2013-14 Europa League, reaching the group stage of that particular competition for the first time in the club’s history.

Fischer achieved promotion with Union in his debut season, and the club reached the Bundesliga for the first time ever. He managed to qualify them for the Conference League, Europa League, and Champions League in three consecutive seasons, and allowed fans to dream bigger than ever before. The Champions League campaign and a transfer upheaval caused Union to struggle at the start of 2023-24, and Fischer was dismissed. He has, however, just led 1. FSV Mainz 05 to a 10th-place finish, satisfyingly outperforming his former employer by the narrowest of margins.

Back to Union’s current strife. Following the unsuccessful Champions League campaign, the club narrowly avoided relegation and has been rebuilding over the last two years. Building themselves around a heavily defensive-oriented style of play, Union have stabilised their position in mid-table. The trade-off here is that they have not had a player reach double figures for goals scored for the last three years, a problem that didn’t exist in the club’s first four Bundesliga seasons.

In fact, last season, the club’s joint-top scorers were two of their starting centre-backs. The young Austrian Leopold Querfeld and the reliable Dutchman Danilho Doekhi each scored seven times in all competitions. This makes signing a reliable centre-forward a priority for Lustrinelli. He should be able to pick them well, being a solid goalscorer himself.

After a five-year absence from the Super League, Thun returned to the big time with a point to prove. A small town of only 44,000 people had no idea what was to come.

In charge of Thun since 2022 following four years with the Swiss U-21s, Lustrinelli has risen sharply alongside the team that he spent three seasons with as a player. Displaying a knack for high-octane, attacking football, Lustrinelli was able to translate his ideas seamlessly and only had to sign a few reinforcements on a tight budget to achieve the impossible.

Thun ultimately romped to victory with three games remaining. This includes entering the Super League Championship Playoffs, where the top six sides face each other once, claiming one point from the five games, and still finishing five points clear of St. Gallen.

Not satisfied with his success in Switzerland, Lustrinelli jumped at the chance to manage in the Bundesliga rather than staying to try qualify Thun for the Champions League group phase. An admirable leap, but how will he transfer his tactical approach to the Bundesliga?

Union’s Expected Set-Up

Of course, transfers are a crucial factor every summer, so I’ve had to remove that aspect of team planning for this section. With key defenders Doekhi and Diogo Leite leaving Union, this has necessitated some important recruitment work at the back. The team has already brought in Zeno van den Bosch from Royal Antwerp on a free transfer, the 22-year-old being seen as a key long-term player. Marvin Friedrich has also joined from Borussia Mönchengladbach after his contract expired, although this signing will be more of a backup option. Outside of these departures and arrivals in defence, nothing notable has happened in the transfer window yet for Union.

Baumgart spent the majority of the season setting up in a 3-4-3 reminiscent of a Ruben Amorim team. Leite, Doekhi and Querfeld started as the centre-backs, mobile wingbacks featured, and a double pivot served the front three which usually consisted of Jeong Woo-Yeong and Oliver Burke as the two 10s, behind a target man.

By the time that Eta took over in April, Baumgart had been experimenting with a 4-2-3-1 to try save his skin. Eta opted for the 3-4-3 for her first three matches without success, before achieving two wins with the 4-2-3-1.

Lustrinelli has been setting Thun up in various iterations of a 4-4-2, often with a flat four in midfield but occasionally lining up asymmetrically depending on the personnel available. Die Eisernen has a strong spine available with the current squad, which makes me inclined to believe that he will continue with a 4-4-2 and issue tactical tweaks as needed.

Vice-captain Rani Khedira, alongside either Andras Schäfer or the upcoming Aljoscha Kemlein, provides stability as the defensively sound central midfielder, which suits Lustrinelli’s approach. Schäfer and Kemlein then provide more mobility as ball-carrying profiles. Wingbacks are less important to Lustrinelli, so don’t be surprised to see them in more withdrawn roles.

The more interesting decision to make is whether Lustrinelli opts to move a winger into one of his two striker roles. This would most likely be Burke or the fledgling Livan Burcu. If Lustrinelli prefers two big number-nine types that can hold the ball up, as he has utilised at Thun, then more recruitment is needed to support the likes of Andrej Ilić and Ilyas Ansah who have struggled for goals with just 11 between them last campaign. Given the current players available, I believe that Lustrinelli will opt for something like this:

Lustrinelli has favoured the 4-4-2 primarily for what it provides while his side is out of possession. Lustrinelli is less bothered about keeping the ball, with his team averaging 46.1% in 2025-26, placing them 9th out of 12 Super League teams. He prefers introducing the possibilities that organised chaos brings. Having energetic wingers allows the team to press high in a 4-2-4 fashion, suffocating the opposition as they try to play across the backline and look to progress the ball into midfield, creating loose ball situations where his team can show their incredible duel capabilities. The midfield two are deployed to block passing lane, while the full-backs step up to mark the opponents’ wingers. This also forces the two centre-halves to split further wide than we typically see as they have to be available to cover long balls into wide areas if the opponent can steal a march on the full-backs.

Their pressing statistics show that they are only the 5th-highest pressers in the league, so fairly average. However, they excel in build-up disruption high up the pitch, which in turn makes them the team with the lowest passes allowed per defensive action with 8.57 compared to a league average of 10.81. This also links in nicely with them being the team with the most fouls conceded at 595, around 16 per 90 minutes. Whether Thun win the ball back immediately or not, it doesn’t matter - you can always commit the foul to reset play during transitional moments.

So expect Union to aim to display physical dominance over opponents, covering significant ground in order to remove passing options. They will go man-for-man as we see top teams across Europe doing in order to achieve this. That means that their out of possession shape will look a little more like this:

Thun ended the Super League season at the top of many statistical tables such as Aerial Duals (798, 88 more than the next best), Shots (649, 62 more than the next best) and xG (66.99). Conversely, their xG per shot is 0.11, placing them 5th in the Super League, meaning that they set up to produce a high volume of shooting opportunities, rather than settling for high quality xG. Thun were also one of the stronger sides in Switzerland from set-pieces, with their set-piece xG of 13.33 placing them 3rd, while having the lowest xGA (expected goals against) in the division with just 9.14.

Union, comparatively, have struggled in progressing the ball into dangerous positions, or just the final third in general. Their passing accuracy was the lowest in the Bundesliga in 2025-26, with 72.6%, as they had been playing incredibly direct football under Baumgart. Lustrinelli doesn’t mind taking the vertical route depending on the game state, though, so he will be able to incorporate this as an option. Union’s set-pieces have been strong though, with a set-piece xG of 13.86 being the 4th-highest in the Bundesliga, and one of the reasons why Doekhi and Querfeld were able to end the season as the club’s top scorers.

So, we can expect Lustrinelli to set the team up to maximise set-piece opportunities, but to generally increase the level of intensity that Union play with, especially by instructing his players to take up pressing positions high up the pitch. With the physical profile of their attackers, I believe that aiming to turn the ball over in the opposition’s half will be possible for Union and therefore it will lead to more goalscoring opportunities than they have been used to. They just need to ensure that they have someone clinical enough to take these chances.

Football is not always a complicated sport. In a recent interview on the Behind the Coach podcast, Lustrinelli explained: “If you bring an energy-intensive style with bravery, with dynamism to the field, and if you like to play this type of football, you can win the ball more often and score a goal faster.” It seems unequivocal from this what Lustrinelli is trying to achieve with Union. If he succeeds, we might be hearing ‘Eisern Union’ bellowing from the terraces of the Stadion An der alten Försterei quite often this season.