Bulinews Player of the Season Awards: TSG Hoffenheim’s Player of the Season | OneFootball

What looked like a desperate attempt of replacing one of your best players over the last few years with a player of the same country, turned into a beautiful redemption story: Vladimir Coufal is TSG Hoffenheim’s best player of the season, according to Bulinews writers.

The Sinsheimer signed the talented rightback from West Ham United on a free deal, as his contract expired at the end of the 2024/25 season. The idea was for him to fill the gap left by Pavel Kader, who played the fourth most games for Hoffenheim (287) before joining his youth club Sparta Prague ahead of this season - and Coufal exceeded expectations massively!

The 33-year old played every single match in the Bundesliga, scored once and made nine assists, the joint most in the team. Coufal was one of the biggest reasons for Hoffenheim‘s stability, reliability and overall success this season and led Christian Ilzer‘s side to 5th place in the Bundesliga in the end, only missing out on Champions League football next season by one point!

STANDOUT PERFORMANCE:

Coufal‘s best performance this season came in the derby against Freiburg at home on Matchday 22: Hoffenheim won the game 3-0 and the relentless Czech ran down the flank like there was no tomorrow. He provided two assists, one for Fisnik Asllani and one for Ozan Kabak and received the man-of-the-match award after the game.

This performance showed that Coufal is easily ready for the big games, like derbies or European nights - he also scored in his first ever match against the Rekordmeister Bayern Munich - but this game ended 1-4 in favour of the Bavarians.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS:

The writer‘s room was very much split on the decision to award one Hoffenheim player to being their player of the season: Coufal (4 votes) only just won the race ahead of the Croatian legend Andrej Kramarić (3 votes).

There were other players in Ilzer’s side who had an outstanding season: new sensation Bazoumana Touré received 2 votes and the young centre-back Albian Hajdari got one vote.

As Hoffenheim had such a good season, many other players would also have deserved to receive some of the votes: Fisnik Asllani, Leon Avdullahu, Wouter Burger, Ozan Kabak and Germany‘s number one Oliver Baumann all played an important part in helping Hoffenheim reach the Europa League.

In the end, the mixture of over-achieving in a surprising way and helping people forget about the exit of one of the club‘s best performing players over the last few years made Coufal stand out just enough.