Corners are probably the most analysed aspect of set-pieces in football, with their proximity to the goal highlighting them an obvious area that should be worked on. While teams do work on corners, as with anything in football, some teams just do it better, and despite teams improving in this aspect, many still waste several corners with a lack of intent, coordination, and intelligent movement.
One of the biggest variations from team to team is where they target their corners, with little answers provided anywhere on which zone is the most efficient and indeed then how you attack that zone. As a result, Ive been prompted to write this series of analyses which has initially used data to find the best teams in each specific zone, before then analysing every corner taken this season by these teams to identify how they attack their zone so effectively. The whole series involved the analysis of over 2000 corners and provides the behaviour and structural trends the best teams display in each zone.
This tactical analysis, as the first in the series, will review general efficiency of teams across Europe, before then looking at who the best teams are in the near post zone, and what makes them the best.
Overall efficiency
To assess which teams performed the best, myself and Márton Balla (who helped me with the data aspect) took efficiency into account, and so calculated an average xG generated per 5 corners from a team. Teams with substantially more corners should naturally generate more xG, and so calculating purely from raw xG would likely remove teams who have fewer opportunities. Below we can see a graph which doesnt take zones into account and just plots xG per five corners against corners per game.
In terms of efficiency, we see Union Berlin are the top team in Europes top five leagues, with the Germans able to generate around 0.21 xG per five corners. Toulouse lie just behind them in efficiency, while the teams with more corners such as RB Leipzig, Everton, West Ham are also performing well. Bayern Munich and Juventus seem to be performing well compared to teams who have a similar amount of corners, and surprisingly we see Liverpools xG per five corners is fairly low compared to other teams. This isnt to say they are poor by any means, as they have generated nine goals from 3.89 xG, but the fact other teams have produced higher xG suggests that Liverpool can also improve and become more efficient.
The worst team from the top five leagues was Paderborn, who averaged only 0.031 xG per five corners, totalling up to 1.00 xG for the season. Lecce also sit next to them on the graph, but they rank lowly due to their high proportion of short corners, with Wyscout not accounting for xG from short corners. As a result, teams who use lots of short corners will rank lowly on this graph, but Ill address the best teams in this area in a later section.
For a brief look across all the leagues, I calculated the xG per corner in each league, by calculating xG per game and the average number of corners. We can see the Bundesliga boasts the highest xG per corner, with Ligue 1 second. A number of variables could go into these figures, such as quality of defending, quality of attack and luck, but the Bundesliga being highest agrees with the general trend seen in the graph above of the Bundesliga containing lots of teams generating high xG from corners. For teams like Toulouse in Ligue 1, it seemed to me when analysing their corners that the defence contributed more to allowing high xG chances, rather than intelligent movement by the attackers.
