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.
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.
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.
