How Premier League teams use permanent coaches to find an edge

Yet not every club feels the same. Tottenham do not have a specialist set-piece coach under Ange Postecoglou and since the start of last season, Spurs have conceded more goals (excluding penalties) than any Premier League team barring Nottingham Forest.

At Chelsea, Mauricio Pochettino did not have a set-piece coach, believing he did not need one, before the Blues hired Cueva and a new set-piece department was set up at Stamford Bridge.

That particular problem was one of the reasons why Chelsea replaced Pochettino with Enzo Maresca this summer.

There has to be buy-in for the role to work, and Austin MacPhee was one of the few staff members who stayed on when Unai Emery replaced Steven Gerrard at Aston Villa two years ago.

Considering how practical Emery is, it’s a seal of approval in itself.

MacPhee – who joined Villa from Midtjylland in 2021 – was also Scotland’s regular coach but quit last month to spend more time with his ailing father.

Villa’s improved set-pieces are credited to him and last season they became the first team in Europe to score 20 goals from set-pieces.

Former Northern Ireland boss Ian Baraclough worked with MacPhee for the national team between 2020 and 2021.

He said: “Austin was innovative. I gave him a free hand and it was a good relationship. He was very strong in his beliefs about things. Sometimes you may have to take the reins, but most of the time you could see things work.

“It just depends on whether you have enough time to work on that, but I’m not surprised he’s at Aston Villa and doing well. He communicates very well and is one of the standouts in the Premier League when it comes to that role go.”

Although Baraclough rightly points out that set pieces have not suddenly become important; They have always been a work in progress, but they have become more inventive.

“Now you have something called the draft strip,” he said.

“That was something we deployed in Bosnia (in 2020). I hadn’t seen it before and Austin came to me and said, ‘What about this? I saw this at Atletico Madrid.’

“We were one of the first British teams to use it and the players thought: ‘What is this all about?’ You could see them laughing and giggling. It was Paddy McNair we used on the floor, it’s brilliant.”

As teams increasingly focus on the fine margins, former Blackburn and England striker Chris Sutton insists a focus on set pieces is nothing new.

He said: ‘The difference with the past was that managers who wanted to work on it did so themselves.

“I understand how the game has evolved since then with the new technology available, but it’s like these things and ideas didn’t exist back in the day when they certainly did.”