Roughly a third of all goals in top European leagues come from set pieces. That figure has been consistent enough across multiple seasons that it stopped being a curiosity a while ago - it’s now a structural fact of the game. And yet the majority of clubs in the Premier League, Serie A, and La Liga still do not employ a dedicated set-piece coach. Instead, the responsibility gets folded into an assistant’s already crowded brief, somewhere between tracking opposition shape and managing training load.
Brentford forced the conversation open during their early Premier League years. Their approach to set pieces - particularly corners and free kicks - was visibly systematic in a way most top-flight sides weren’t, and it contributed meaningfully to results they had no business getting against better-resourced opponents. Thomas Frank spoke openly about the analytical underpinning of their dead-ball work, and for a brief period it felt like the rest of the league might take the hint.
Most didn’t.
The Gap Between Knowing and Doing
The problem isn’t ignorance. Sporting directors across Europe are well aware of the numbers. Expected goals models have been integrating set-piece quality for years, and any club with a half-decent analytics department can tell you exactly how many goals their corner routine is leaking relative to expected output. The issue is that hiring a specialist - someone whose entire job is dead-ball design, delivery selection, and movement pattern variation - still feels, to many clubs, like an admission that the head coach can’t handle it.
That logic is bizarre when you consider how disaggregated the modern coaching staff already is. There are coaches specifically for goalkeepers, for fitness, for pressing triggers, for transitions. The idea that set pieces specifically should remain the head coach’s domain, or at best a vague collective responsibility, doesn’t hold up.
Delivery Is Only Half of It
What the better set-piece systems have figured out - and what gets underreported - is that the delivery itself is almost secondary to movement design. Getting a runner into a specific zone at a specific time, dragging markers, creating secondary ball zones: that level of choreographic precision requires dedicated repetition and someone whose sole job is to notice when it breaks down and why. A good corner routine run badly in a match usually means it wasn’t drilled with enough variation in training. That’s a resource problem disguised as an execution problem.
Manchester City under Pep Guardiola improved their set-piece output noticeably across the 2022–23 season, partly through more intentional near-post movement sequencing. Liverpool’s late-Klopp years featured some of the more elaborate blocking and flick-on routines in the league. Neither club did this accidentally.
The clubs still treating set pieces as an improvised afterthought aren’t just leaving goals on the table. They’re doing it with full visibility of the data telling them so.