Set-piece situations can define a team's season and secure vital points, which can be the difference between staying up and relegation, or between continental qualification and mid-table obscurity. As a result, like everything in football, more focus and detail are being put into set-pieces, with different strategies and trends used...
Marginal gains within any sport are vital for success and one of the most recent trends in football has been the increased emphasis placed on throw-ins. Once, if a team was said to emphasise throw ins you would expect long-throw routines into the box, but more and more in modern...
The return of the UEFA Champions League this week sees Liverpool host Atletico Madrid at Anfield, with Liverpool looking to overturn a 1-0 loss from the first leg. Liverpool struggled to create chances in the game, but weren't poor in terms of tactics and got into some good areas where...
Gerhard Struber arrived at Barnsley from Wolfsberger AC, having previously secured a third-placed finish for the Austrian side and gaining impressive results in the Europa League this season. Despite this, he arrived as a virtual unknown at Barnsley, having previously analysed Struber and his Wolfsberger AC side in the November...
Set piece situations play a vital role in modern football. That is the reason why practicing corner-kicks and free-kicks has become common. However, there is one set piece situation which often gets overlooked: the kick-off. More and more sides utilise this set piece as an opportunity to execute their match...
Set pieces and in particular the corner kicks are still underutilised weapons in football. In the Championship this season, Aston Villa lead the way in the set-piece scoring charts with 22 goals. Millwall are 5th in those rankings having scored 16 goals from set-pieces. This reflects a scoring rate from...
InStat have recently completed a scientific analysis of penalty taking. We analysed 91,000 penalty shots from our database from 2009 to the end of August 2018 (one of the most in-depth analyses of penalties ever undertaken). The penalties analysed were from across the World of football, both male and female...
Much has been made over the sacking of Julen Lopetegui in recent weeks, with many blaming the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo as a reason as to why Real Madrid simply aren’t scoring as many goals. Obviously making up the 40+ goals Ronaldo brings per season isn’t easy, but there’s another...
The World Cup is no longer a driver for new tactical trends. It lags behind club football in terms of innovation. Instead, the World Cup has become a solidifier of new tactical norms. The FIFA World Cup 2018 was the set piece tournament as 73 out of 169 goals were...
It seems a long time ago since Roy Hodgson put Harry Kane on corner duty at the Euros, now England are set-piece kings - with an incredible 75% of their goals (9 out of 12 goals scored) at the World Cup coming from set-piece situations (penalties, free kicks + corners),...
A remarkably high amount of the goals scored during the World Cup so far have been scored from set-piece situations. Being extremely careful not to concede goals from corners and free-kicks by having most of the players defending the set piece would be a reasonable reaction. Not for Juan Carlos...
In Part 1 I explored Midtjylland's use of free-kicks and throw-ins that have scored them an incredible amount of goals this season, in this part I’ll explore their use of corners, which have played an even bigger part in their season. Vs AaB 1st October We start off with a...
Midjtylland in Denmark are one of the few clubs in the world that are embracing set-pieces for they are a hugely underrated aspect of the game. They hired a set-piece specialist along with dedicated kicking coaches to enhance their set-piece output and have even built a dedicated “set-piece lounge” where...
