Cornering Success: The art and science of Burgos’ Segunda Division set-piece supremacy

Burgos occupy the eighth position in La Liga 2, Segunda División, with 49 points after 32 matches. The differences are very close, and the competition is intense. Notably, the gap between them and the first-placed team, Leganés, is only 10 points. This highlights the significance of attention to detail in making a difference.

Burgos conceded 41 goals on the defensive front, placing them eighth in the weakest defensive lines, trailing by seven goals compared to Villarreal B, the team with the worst defensive record, having conceded 48 goals. Conversely, on the offensive side, they have scored 40 goals, ranking fifth in the strongest attacking lines, on par with Real Oviedo and Eldense, with a difference of 11 goals compared to Racing Santander, the team with the strongest attacking line, who have scored 51 goals.

After scrutinising the statistics, it was found that Burgos heavily rely on offensive corner kicks to create danger for their opponents. They have scored eight goals from corner kicks, accounting for 20% of their total goals. This underscores their significant impact, especially considering they are also the team with the highest number of goals scored from corner kicks in the Spanish La Liga 2, Segunda División, tied with Espanyol and Eldense with eight goals each.

In this tactical analysis, we will discuss the tactics that have led to Burgos superiority in offensive corner kicks, elucidating that this is not a coincidence but rather recurrent ideas. Despite their simplicity and repetition, these tactics remain effective, posing various questions and challenges to defenders. We will focus on two general concepts, each containing further diversity within them, namely short corner kicks and utilising traffic within the six-yard box.

Short corners

The first general idea we will discuss is using short corners effectively with good, simple ideas to score goals, not only a desperate trial. We will start with their idea of leaving the short area empty at first to target it suddenly, exploiting the absence of defenders there.

In the photo below, the opponent defends with a man-marking defending system with only two zonal defenders, highlighted in blue. At the same time, Burgos leave the short area empty, asking the targeted player to act as a rebound player at first and then go to the edge of the box suddenly to receive a short pass from the taker, but you may say that the red defender will go with him, so what is the point of that?

The answer is so simple, but many coaches dont pay attention to that, which is  Burgos would be in a 2-v-1 situation because the taker would join the game. Hence, a defender needs to come to help to make it a 2-v-2 situation, and this defender is the near post defender, in our case, who has to cut a long way to reach the taker.

As we have mentioned,  the near-post defender cuts a long way to reach the taker, leaving him with the ball in a large area near the box with many options to threaten the opponents goal. Sometimes, the taker exploits this area to dribble more inside to face the near-post defender in the box, which allows him to pass him and shoot or to shoot directly, and you may realise how good that is by imagining how many complicated tactics try to put the skilful winger in 1-v-1 situations all the match in open-play phases.

They also have other solutions, such as targeting the far post by a player who starts initially in a more central position, which causes orientation problems for his marker to keep tracking him and the ball at the same time while exploiting fake runs from his mates toward the near post, as shown below.