On average, between 20% and 30% of goals scored come from set-pieces.
Despite this, it wasn’t until the 2010s that the dedicated set-piece coach role started becoming more common.
The exact numbers of goals scored from corners and free kicks etc. will vary from one team to another, from one league to another, and from one year to another, but if you zoom out the stats will almost always fall within that 20%-30% bracket. That doesn’t include penalties either.
This means that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 of all goals come from a set-piece, demonstrating just how important they are in football. If you want to win trophies you have to win games, and to win games you have to score goals.
A study of almost 300,000 football matches from across Europe found that 1-1 was the most common score in football, followed by 1-0, then 2-1. In fact, the top 5 most common score lines had just a single goal between them, representing about 45% of all games studied. This means a single goal could have clawed back a draw or won the game in a huge number of matches.
If set-pieces are such golden opportunities for goal scoring then clubs should be giving them a lot of attention, but there are still a handful of Premier League teams who don’t have a coach focussing on match winning plays, and it becomes rarer the lower down the leagues you go.
Nevertheless, the site of a coach no one recognises barrelling towards the manager before corners and free kicks is on the rise, and plenty of people in the know think we will see more of it in the future, so let’s find out why.
How Important is a Set-Piece Coach?
The best way to answer this is to look at a few examples.
Brentford are an obvious case in point.
They are well known as masters of the set-piece, but after they were promoted to the Premier League in 2021 their abilities became more widely recognised.
Newly promoted Premier League teams tend to struggle to avoid relegation, but Brentford finished 13th in their first season, largely thanks to their set-piece success. They couldn’t compete financially with the big teams, but they could tactically outsmart them, and the stats speak for themselves – in their first two seasons in the top flight, Brentford were in the top 3 for goral from set-pieces, alongside Manchester City and Liverpool.
| Rank | Team | Goals from Set-Pieces | Total Set-Pieces | Goals per Set-Piece |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Liverpool | 31 | 598 | 1 goal per 19.3 set-pieces |
| 2 | Brentford | 30 | 594 | 1 goal per 19.8 set-pieces |
| 3 | Manchester City | 32 | 658 | 1 goal per 20.6 set-pieces |
So really, they were the second most effective set-piece takers in their first two Premier League seasons.
Their tactic is to start from the same structure so opposing sides can’t tell which play they are about to try. So if you had a still image of the starting point of three of their corner plays, they would all look the same. They also swarm the box with players who all fill a small space, only breaking away to carry out their assigned roles at the last second.
Not only were Brentford’s set-pieces well choreographed then, but even if an opposition analysed them and knew their plays inside out, the level of deception employed until the last second made it almost impossible to know which plays they were going for in time to do anything about it.
Another brilliant example of the impact a good set-piece coach can have is Nicolas Jover, who joined Arsenal in 2021 but had previously been the set-piece coach at Brentford and Manchester City. The Gunners had scored just 5 goals from set-pieces the season before Jover joined, ranking them 3rd from bottom in the whole league by that statistic. Two years later, they matched the Premier League record of 22 goals from set-pieces in a single season, ranking top.
A lot of their success came down to using ‘blockers’ in a way not totally dissimilar to American football. These players are tasked with getting opposition players out of the way by making dummy runs or holding them up, so the intended player has a clear path to the ball. This is just one tactic they used but it demonstrates the ingenuity.
These examples show how a set-piece coach can work wonders for underdog teams and title contenders alike, so their importance cannot be overstated.
Why Don’t All Clubs Employ Them?
Although the role of a dedicated set-piece coach is becoming more and more common, there are still more clubs without than with one.
This is partly because the idea is only just catching on – although there is no arguing with the stats when a club hires a good coach – and partly because it is yet another expense. For rich clubs in the Premier League this is not so much of a problem, but the further down the football pyramid you go the less spare cash there is to spend on luxuries like set-piece coaches.
If you take a League 2 club like Grimsby Town, chances are their coaching team will be about 5 or 6 strong and they may also have an analyst in the team somewhere. Then you’ve got a team like Manchester United who have at least twice as many coaching staff plus an army of 15-20 analysts.
At smaller clubs, they just can’t afford to dedicate one staff place to a single element like set-pieces.
The problem has as much to do with time as money.
A lot of the set-piece coach’s work is done in analysis. They study hours of footage, dig into piles of stats and data, and then work out where their team’s problems lie when defending free kicks, or how to exploit a weakness when taking corners, etc.
The time spent working with players doesn’t necessarily have to be too demanding, it’s the work the coaches do beforehand that is the bulk of the job. A set-piece coach can do this work while the squad are training with the first team coach and his team, they can even enlist the help of a few analysts to speed things up. At a smaller club, whoever is in charge of set-pieces will also be in charge of several other areas, all of which would have their own dedicated member of staff at a richer club.
Just Another Way to Widen the Gap Between Rich and Poor
We know from the evidence that a set-piece coach can have a huge impact on the performance of a club, and I’ve only discussed their merit in terms of scoring goals, I haven’t even touched on how they can prevent them at the other end.
We also know that having a dedicated set-piece coach is a luxury most clubs cannot afford.
So if we take the human being out of the equation, we have something that can improve the performance of your team but only if you can afford it.
When clubs perform better they get richer, and when they get richer they can afford to spend more on staying at the top. This is been creating a worrying void between the top half of the Premier League and everyone else for a long time now, and set-piece coaches are just another way the trend will continue.
Yes, a good set-piece coach can work wonders with a smaller team as in the case of Brentford, but is a set-piece coach going to work for the club that pay him £200k a year or £750k a year? Exactly. All that will happen is the best coaches will go to the teams that can pay them the most, but most clubs will continue to find them unaffordable at all.
There’s not an awful lot anyone can do about this, and in itself it won’t make a cataclysmic difference to anything. It’s just one more wedge to widen the gap between the rich and the poor.