Marginal gains: How set piece specialists are thriving in the Premier League

André Onana, the Manchester United goalkeeper, was preparing to defend against a free kick in a Premier League game last December when he realized someone was behind him. It was Leon Bailey, the Aston Villa winger. Onana regarded Bailey with confusion. How could Bailey be standing there, between him and the goal, during a free kick?

Then Bailey began to sing. “Ohhhh-na-na, look what you started,” he teased — the chorus of “Na Na,” Trey Songz’s 2014 hit. “Oh-na-na! Why you gotta act so naughty?” Bewildered, Onana complimented his voice. Bailey responded with a little dance. “The whole point was for me to distract him,” Bailey says now.

Bailey’s positioning had been choreographed by Austin MacPhee, Villa’s set piece coach. Earlier that week, MacPhee had called Jonathan Moss, then the Premier League’s supervisor of referees, to ask whether positioning a player behind a goalkeeper during a free kick would be legal. It was, but only if the player didn’t physically impede the keeper, remained out of his line of sight, and was uninvolved in the play that followed. MacPhee then met with Bailey at the canteen at Villa’s Bodymoor Heath training facility to discuss the role he’d scripted.

Bailey was into it. “I just thought it was something new and interesting,” he says. “I said to Austin, ‘I’m going to go behind him. And then I’m going to sing a song.'”

As John McGinn approached the ball, Bailey dashed out from behind Onana to remove himself from the play. Simultaneously, Jacob Ramsey ran down the right flank, presumably McGinn’s target. Amid the confusion, McGinn bounced a kick a few feet in front of Onana, who flailed at it as it skidded past and into the net. In the coaching box beside Villa manager Unai Emery, MacPhee broke into a grin.

MacPhee is one of several designated set piece coaches who are quietly having a profound impact on the Premier League. For the clubs that use them the most, perhaps only the manager or head coach is more important. Nicolas Jover helped guide Arsenal to 22 goals from set pieces last season — nearly all in-swinging corners — to match a Premier League record. In 2022-23, Antonio Conte’s Tottenham Hotspur led the Premier League with 19 set piece goals under the tutelage of Gianni Vio, a set piece pioneer who now works at Watford and with the United States men’s national team.

At Brentford, Keith Andrews has made a specialty of the opening kickoff as a scripted play. Earlier this season, his club scored from the opening whistle in three consecutive games. The streak ended against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Oct. 5, “but only because we lost the coin toss,” insists Thomas Frank, Brentford’s manager. When Wolves took the lead in the game’s second minute, the Bees scored off the ensuing kickoff. Frank counts that as four in a row.

MacPhee, who played college soccer at UNC-Wilmington from 1999 to 2002, has pushed things the furthest, his set pieces unfolding like touch football plays drawn up in the dirt on Thanksgiving morning. “It’s exciting as a player to go into his meetings and see what he has up his sleeve,” says AFC Bournemouth‘s Ryan Christie, who experienced MacPhee’s flights of imagination over the past three seasons with the Scotland national team. “You want to work at it, and you want to be part of it.”

At one point last season, MacPhee spent long hours plotting how to have someone who began a free kick with his back to the goal end up taking it. When it was ready, he used it against Brighton & Hove Albion.

It unfolded like a typical set piece. McGinn waited on one side of the ball, Lucas Digne on the other. One of the two would take the kick; the other was clearly a decoy. But which was which?

About 10 yards in front of them, Douglas Luiz stood with his back to the goal. He started to drift back upfield, toward his own end. Simultaneously, McGinn and Digne began running forward. Luiz passed them heading in the opposite direction, like cars on a highway. When he reached the ball, he pivoted and lofted a pass to Moussa Diaby, who had snuck through the wall and emerged in front of goalkeeper Jason Steele. Diaby was knocked to the ground and no penalty was called, but the play had led to an opportunity, which is all MacPhee can try to control.

That set piece didn’t lead to a goal, but 25 of MacPhee’s did last season. Villa scored more from free kicks and corners than any other team in Europe’s five biggest leagues — more than a quarter of their goals across all competitions. Not coincidentally, they earned a place in the UEFA Champions League for the first time. Then they scored off their first corner in their Premier League opener this year, and scored again in the first corner of their first Champions League game. In Birmingham, the free-spirited MacPhee has become a cult figure. There’s even a supporters’ song about him at Villa Park.

Free kicks and corners have long been perceived as almost random exercises. The goal is to put the ball near the box, then hope someone is agile or tall enough to get it into the net. These specialists are changing that.

“Until very recently, most teams didn’t spend any time practicing set pieces” says Ian Graham, who ran Liverpool’s analytics department from 2012 to 2023 and now runs his own consulting firm, Ludonautics. “Maybe you’d do it for 10 minutes before an important game, but it wouldn’t necessarily be informed by any kind of analysis.”

With the ready availability of data, it has become clear that optimizing set pieces can yield a dozen or more goals annually. But you won’t get those goals, Brentford’s Frank insists, without hiring someone who concentrates on that and nothing else. Since arriving at Brentford in 2018, Frank has used a dedicated set piece coach. He insists he will never again work without one. “In my opinion, you can’t,” he says. “Not if you want to be successful.”

play

‘Onana, Oh yeah!’ Who is Aston Villa’s creative set-piece coach?

Bruce Schoenfeld explains how Austin MacPhee creativity has helped power Aston Villa’s set-pieces.

In 2015, Brentford was playing in the Championship, not long removed from League Two, when the club hired Vio to only handle set pieces. A former banker, Vio had written a treatise on them for his UEFA coaching badges. Putting even a little forethought into free kicks and corners, he wrote, would be the equivalent of adding a 15-goal striker. “The difference is,” he says now, “that striker can be injured or suspended.”

Brentford’s squad responded to Vio with general bemusement. There were no set piece specialists at any club in England, as far as anyone knew, and only a handful anywhere in the world. When Vio was brought on at the end of training sessions to explain what he was looking to implement, there was grumbling. “The modern player wants to train and get off the pitch,” says Stuart Dallas, who was at Brentford at the time. “The set piece coach needs 20 or 25 minutes extra.”

But Dallas had been working with a set piece coach while representing Northern Ireland. That coach happened to be MacPhee.

“He was the first person I saw on a football pitch with an iPad,” Dallas says. “He would chart the topspin and the ball speed and all that. We were a small country that wasn’t blessed with so much quality, so we had to take advantage of every small gain we could.” By 2016, Northern Ireland had scored 11 of their 17 goals from corners or free kicks, qualifying for the Euros for the first time in their history.

Dallas thought Vio could do the same for Brentford. Like Northern Ireland at the international level, Brentford didn’t have the resources of the biggest Championship clubs. They needed an edge that relied on strategy rather than talent. “We need to buy into this,” he told his teammates. “This can be the difference that gets us in the playoffs or promoted.”

“Set pieces are a different moment than the normal game,” Vio explains. “In the normal game, the two teams are playing together. But when there is a set piece, we are the owner of the time. That changes everything. I can decide how many players are in the box, when everyone is where, and what happens in the first moment.”

That Brentford were the first club in England to use a set piece coach was hardly a surprise. “The general DNA of the club is both innovative and about the marginal gain,” Frank says. “We try to find areas where we can tweak just a little bit. But actually, set pieces is more than just a marginal thing. I think it’s a big thing. And it surprised me that it took so long for more clubs to follow.”

In Brentford owner Matthew Benham, a professional gambler, Frank works for someone who understands that set pieces are the cheapest way to obtain goals in the world marketplace. (“It’s far cheaper to buy height in center backs,” Graham confirms, “than it is to buy finishing skills.”) To underscore the club’s commitment, players were awarded bonuses based on how many goals were scored from corners and free kicks — not just the goal scorers but the entire squad. “It’s not about one player,” Vio stresses. “When we score goals off set pieces, all the players recognize that.”

At the start of the 2021-22 season, only Brentford, Arsenal and Aston Villa employed dedicated set piece coaches among Premier League clubs. Now there are at least a dozen. (Liverpool and Manchester United hired one for the first time before this season, while Tottenham, Brighton and Newcastle United still don’t have one.) Nearly all of them are kept under the radar. They’re rarely allowed to be quoted. They don’t get publicized on official websites. They’re treated as stealth weaponry, human equivalents of wearable monitors or proprietary algorithms.

But then the team lines up to do a free kick. Suddenly the head coach gives way to some other guy waving a clipboard and exhorting the players. At Villa, for example, MacPhee is the only assistant allowed to join Emery in the coaching box or even stand up during a game. At Brentford, Frank disappears during set pieces. “I do nothing,” he says. “I just sit back.”

Inside the game, these coaches are coveted. Vio eventually went to Leeds United and, later, AC Milan and Tottenham. His replacement at Brentford, the German-born Jover, stayed until Manchester City swooped in the way it might for a talented young winger or striker. That hiring, in 2019, was engineered by Mikel Arteta, then an assistant under Pep Guardiola. When Jover’s contract at City expired in June 2021, he left to join Arteta at Arsenal.

Jover’s set pieces look deceptively normal. They just tend to work: Arsenal has scored a league-leading eight goals off set pieces in the Premier League this season, including their past three. In Europe, too, Jover’s work is paying dividends, most recently with a Gabriel Jesus header off a Declan Rice corner in a 5-1 dismissal of Sporting Clube de Portugal on Nov. 26.

During a recent Carabao Cup tie at Preston North End, Arsenal won a free kick to the right of keeper Freddie Woodman. Gabriel Martinelli sent a ball over the scrum assembled in front of the goal to Jakub Kiwior, who nodded it into the box. It landed at the feet of Gabriel Jesus, who banged it into the net.

It wasn’t scripted like the plays MacPhee creates but rather was a tactical construct designed to maximize opportunities. “Coach Nico is brilliant,” Jesus gushed after the game. “We have good headers, a tall team, a strong team. He gives us the right structure, and we just follow what he says.”

When Jover left Brentford, he was replaced by Bernardo Cueva, who helped engineer the club’s promotion to the Premier League, only for Chelsea to snatch Cueva up this past summer. Andrews, a former Wolves captain, had been scouted by Phil Giles, Brentford’s director of football, while working in a variety of roles at Sheffield United. At Brentford, he has one role. “We, of all clubs, know how much a set piece is worth,” Frank says.

Brentford practice set pieces at the end of every training session. “We put so much energy into this,” forward Bryan Mbeumo says. “To see it pay off is good for us.”

But whoever thought of a kickoff as a set piece? “It’s harder to score from a kickoff,” acknowledges Mbeumo, who has done that inside the game’s first minute twice this season. “We have the ball in the middle of the pitch, and you have to pass it back. There’s a certain amount of luck involved.”

Maybe there was luck on Sept. 14 when Yoane Wissa scored in the first minute at Manchester City. That goal involved a headed cross that Ederson, City’s goalkeeper, dove for and deflected into the air for Wissa to flick home. But a week later at Spurs, a stolen pass, a feed to Keane Lewis-Potter on the wing, a cross, and then an acrobatic left-footed strike by Mbeumo into the upper corner gave Brentford another instant lead. A week after that, at home against West Ham United on Sept. 28, Mbeumo scored another in the opening minute: another left-footer off another stolen pass.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed around the Premier League. “It was an important part of our preparation, to be honest,” said Kieran McKenna, Ipswich Town‘s manager, after his team managed to successfully avoid allowing an early goal at GTech Stadium in late October. McKenna had studied tape, his coaches had studied tape, and they’d spent hours assessing how to thwart the threat.

“The most common mistake teams tend to have made is getting caught on that second ball, and trying to complete passes in the first couple of seconds,” McKenna explained. “We were prepared for that part of the game.”

After deciding on a defensive strategy, McKenna and his staff needed to download it to the team. As it turned out, all four of Brentford’s goals in their 4-3 victory over Ipswich were scored in open play, but that doesn’t mean those scripted kickoffs had no impact. Preparing for them used up time, a finite resource, leaving less of it to spend on everything else. In a one-goal defeat, that might have been the difference.

MacPhee was playing at Forfar Athletic, in the nether reaches of the Scottish football pyramid, when he was recruited by UNC-Wilmington. After college, he drifted from Romania to Japan and then back to Scotland, where he attained his coaching badges. At that time, the value of set pieces hadn’t yet penetrated his consciousness. But by the time he came to Villa from Danish side Midtjylland in 2021, he had made them his specialty.

That same year, he agreed to work for Scotland. In the 24 games before he arrived, Scotland scored one goal off a set piece and conceded six. In his 24 games with the national team before leaving this past summer, they scored 16 and conceded four.

Such success has given MacPhee license to basically create what he wants. Emery gives him all the time he needs on the training pitch twice a week to make those vectors and dotted lines come to life. When they lead to a goal, the result is a unique sense of satisfaction for everyone involved. MacPhee compares the meticulous planning and precise execution to robbing a bank, a phrase that has been adopted by the Villa players. “When one of [those plays] works,” Bailey says, “we all celebrate.”

Before any of that can happen, MacPhee spends hours watching videos of the coming opponent — but these days, so does everyone in his position. All that scouting has almost reached diminishing returns; each coach knows that the opposition coach knows what he knows. The psychological warfare that ensues can approach the level of Mad Magazine’s old Spy vs. Spy cartoons.

Heading into Villa’s game against Bournemouth, MacPhee was sure that Shaun Cooper, the Cherries’ set piece specialist, had come across video of a free kick routine that involved McGinn running down one side or the other, then stopping at the opponent’s wall to serve as a screen while a trailing player hustled past. MacPhee also had used a variation of the play for Scotland, so he figured Bournemouth’s Christie would also remember it. To remind him, he used it again during a Champions League game against Bologna four days before the Bournemouth fixture.

So when McGinn ran down the left side and stopped, Christie was ready. “Go! Go!” he shouted. A Bournemouth player who was serving as the draft evader behind the wall scrambled to his feet and ran out to meet McGinn. But this time, the maneuver was a fake. “Smoke and mirrors,” Christie says now. Instead, Villa’s two tallest players, Amadou Onana and Ezri Konsa, ended up unmarked on the opposite side. Only an acrobatic save prevented a goal.

Occasionally, the process does break down. Against Liverpool in early November, all four of Villa’s first-half corners resulted in clear chances. Two ended in acrobatic Caoimhín Kelleher saves of headers by Onana and Diego Carlos, but the other two chances were Liverpool’s. It doesn’t take a set piece coach to notice that Villa’s players all push forward during corners, leaving the back exposed. Villa’s first two led to breakaways in the other direction, one that Darwin Núñez converted, and one he missed.

After Liverpool won 2-0, the MacPhee cult was ridiculed on talk shows and podcasts. Villa’s players were philosophical about the breakdowns. “Sometimes you have to risk to get rewarded,” Bailey explained. “We’ve been doing that, and we’ll keep doing that. He won’t change anything,” he said about MacPhee. “He doesn’t need to change anything.”

Despite their success, Aston Villa remain undermanned for an elite Premier League club. Villa don’t have a player whose wages rank among the Premier League’s 45 highest, for example, but goals from set pieces are a crucial equalizer. After the loss to Liverpool, Emery pointed out that Villa easily could have added another two.

Through 15 games, MacPhee’s free kicks and corners had created 7.94 xG (expected goals) in the Premier League — second only to Arsenal’s 8.84. If his club’s set pieces continue to provide opportunities like that, Emery knows the rest will take care of itself.