The science and swagger of the new-age set piece

Stuart Reid has never been busier. He has been working in football for the better part of a decade, but he cannot remember a time when his services were in such demand. It is not simply that his clients now stretch across five countries and two continents. It is that their appetite for his work appears to be bottomless.

The first time Reid prepared a report for a club, nine years ago, it amounted to 10 pages or so. This was, he was told, much too long. No manager, coach, or analyst had time to read 10 whole pages on the ins and outs of the one element of the game that is Reid’s singular expertise: corners. He was told to condense his information.

The dossiers he submits these days can extend to as much as 30 pages. They contain visualisations, screenshots, videos, reams of data. “Nobody says anything,” he said. His clubs want absolutely everything he can give them, in as much detail and depth as he can manage. It is, he said, “a good time to be in the set-piece business”. He is most likely not the only one to feel that way. The majority of clubs in the Premier League now employ a specialist set-piece coach. A few, like Aston Villa’s Austin MacPhee, are almost as recognisable as the managers. Nicolas Jover, responsible for Arsenal’s prowess from corners, has reached such a level of fame that he has his own mural, not far from the Emirates Stadium.

They are increasingly voguish in the Championship, too. Reid spent several months last season working with Derby County. “We scored eight goals in a dozen games or something from corners,” he said. “That obviously helped us stay up.” His contract was not renewed this year. The club decided to appoint someone in-house.

That can be read as both a cause and a consequence of a sea change in football’s thinking. For much of the last two decades, the game’s dominant ideology held that an interest in the dead ball was either passé or downright gauche. The game’s great sophisticates liked their corners and their free-kicks as they liked their midfielders: short. That belief was justified not just by aesthetics but by science. Set pieces, according to early interpretations of football’s data, were a chronically inefficient way of creating chances. In The Numbers Game, the academics Chris Anderson and David Sally found only one in five corners even led to a shot, let alone a goal. Going short, keeping the ball, recycling possession didn’t just look better. It worked more.

That is not how football sees set pieces any more. Rather than writing off corners, in particular, data analysts and coaches have come to regard them as what Reid refers to as “low-hanging fruit. If you can improve them by just a couple of percent, that’s a pretty good competitive edge.”

Nor is it just corners. Premier League teams now see set pieces – and the opportunities they promise – all around them. Newcastle United, like Paris Saint-Germain, have experimented with playing for touch from kick-off, believing that winning territory is worth more than retaining the ball. It is an insight supported by data, as Lorenzo Cascioli, a researcher at the University of Leuven, proved in a paper last year.

This time last year, Brentford managed to score inside the first minute of three consecutive Premier League games. It was no coincidence, the club’s then manager Thomas Frank said. “We have a clear strategy for every set play,” he told Men In Blazers. That category in his mind included not just corners, free-kicks and throw-ins, but kick-offs, too.

Thomas Tuchel, the England manager, noted earlier this month that “long throws are back”, an observation borne out by data from Opta: in the small sample size offered by the first three games of this season, there have been three long throws per game, treble the amount that might have been seen five years ago.

Whether this development is welcome or not is a matter of taste. The Liverpool manager, Arne Slot, was uncharacteristically cutting in his assessment of Newcastle’s approach after his team’s 3-2 win at St James’ Park last month. “I’m not too sure if I saw a football match,” he said. Julian Nagelsmann, the Germany manager, was similarly disdainful of Northern Ireland’s unadorned style this week. “It’s not brilliant to watch,” he said.

The tendency, of course, is to cast these assessments as little more than the complaints of a cosseted elite, appalled that their opponents might have the gall to stand up to them. There is, after all, no moral imperative to play the game for the approval of an opponent. There are no points for artistic impression.

But they are correct to say that the emphasis on set pieces affects the game as a spectacle. As Thomas Grønnemark, a coach who specialises in throw-ins, pointed out, football is undermined if there is “too much stop and start”, if the desire to maximise set pieces comes at the cost of “making the game beautiful”.

That is, at least in part, because of the deliberate theatre that now surrounds dead balls. “One of the rules we had when I came in was that when we got a corner, the centre-backs were to walk slowly to the opposition penalty area,” Andy Parslow, formerly the set-piece coach at Swansea, told the Creative Set Pieces podcast.

He instructed them to stroll forwards “with their chests out, their shoulders swaying, looking like they had a real swagger about them”. It was, Parslow said, a deliberate attempt to project “a high level of confidence, to get into the minds of the opponents”. It will be familiar
to anyone who has seen Arsenal take a corner recently, the players moving deliberately into their
Jover-mandated positions. It is tense, and it is dramatic, but it also involves no actual football happening for some time.

And that is a problem. In the three opening rounds of the Premier League, the ball has been in play for a little more than 52 minutes in each game, on average. Last year, that figure was closer to 55. The year before, thanks to a stricter approach to calculating injury time, it was nearly 56. A growing portion of modern football is waiting for someone to take a set piece.

It is unlikely to change. Set pieces, as Reid said, offer a chance for “control”. In a fluid, chaotic sport, they are a rare static event, an isolated action more akin to American sports. They are something that can be measured and gauged and improved. Their return to prominence is rooted not just in how the data is read, but in the existence of the data itself; a sign not only that the amount of information we have is helping to change the way we understand the game, but how we play it.

Photo credit: John Walton/PA Wire