Set-Piece Coach - Andreas Georgson

[Convict Colony]

Thought i'd start a specific thread with this article from a couple of years ago about him.

 

Andreas Georgson on Brentford, the rise of set-piece coaches, working for Arteta… and why teams take short corners

 

“The reason why it has taken so long for set pieces to become a specialist area is that no one really likes it,” says Andreas Georgson with a smile.

“No coach goes through the ranks of education to become a set-piece specialist. They go because they love the tactics, or they love the leadership or they love the team building. No one goes through it all to say, ‘I want to focus on throw-ins’.”

Georgson might not have spent time as a set-piece coach himself, were it not for a fateful visit to England. While studying for his UEFA Pro License at leading Swedish club Malmo, he was allowed to take a trip to study the inner-workings of other teams. He knew he would visit Swansea City, then led by Graham Potter, the young manager who had made such an impression in Swedish football with Ostersunds. But he had also read about an intriguing club in west London whose dedication to good process was turning heads and producing results: Brentford.

That visit to Brentford’s training ground altered the course of Georgson’s career. It was there he first met Nicolas Jover, then Brentford’s specialist set-piece coach. When Jover was cherry-picked by Manchester City in 2019, Brentford remembered Georgson, and offered him the chance to move to England.

Football and life tend to move in cycles. After a year with Brentford, Georgson was asked to join Mikel Arteta’s staff at Arsenal. A year on, an irresistible offer to return to his beloved Malmo as sporting director meant leaving London. His replacement at Arsenal? None other than Jover.

Now Georgson is overseeing first-team matters at Malmo, plotting domestic dominance and their first season in the Champions League since 2015-16. He spoke to The Athletic about his journey in football, his time with Brentford and Arsenal, and what exactly being a set piece coach actually entails.

Georgson did not arrive at coaching after an illustrious career as a player. His dream of being a professional footballer was never fulfilled, and his playing days were spent in the amateur tiers of Swedish football. Alongside this, he studied. “I did a Master’s in economics,” he tells The Athletic. “It looked like my life was headed that way.” Then, age 24, he received an offer to become an instructor in the younger age groups of Malmo’s academy.

That began a 14-year spell with Malmo, the club in Sweden’s third largest city where his heart lies — 12 of which were spent focused on the academy. This was his chance to be involved at elite level, and he dedicated himself to it absolutely. “I don’t have a name from my playing career,” he explains. “I don’t think I have any special talent for the game — I just have a real passion. And, from my parents, a really strong belief that if you’re humble enough to learn every day, you can become what you want.

“That has been my only aim — to constantly say, ‘OK, how can I improve that? How can we, as a club, improve our plans around youth scouting, and development plans, and methodology?’ So, I kept pushing my bosses on these areas that I felt we needed to improve. I was a bit of a pain in the ass over the years, but that also led me to taking on so many different roles.”

Although best known in England as a set-piece specialist, Georgson’s work in the academy took on many guises. He eventually became their head of youth scouting, and head of methodology for the academy. He moved on to coaching, leading the Malmo Under-17 team for four years. Finally, he stepped up to spend two seasons as assistant coach to the first team.

While acquiring his Pro Licence, Georgson took those fateful study trips to the UK. “I was thinking, ‘OK, how can I get new perspectives?’”

Swansea were an obvious choice: “He (Potter) had a Swedish coach called Bjorn Hamberg I knew from before,” says Georgson. “Graham really impressed me in the way he took more into account than just the results — and that became a theme of the trip.”

Andreas Georgson embraces Malmo legend Roy Hodgson after his final away match managing Crystal Palace at Arsenal in May (Photo: Frank Augstein/PA Images via Getty Images)

And then there were Brentford. Then a Championship side, they were in a position where they could afford to take risks.

“I think it’s a case of the bigger the club, the bigger the pressure from the outside, the more push to the short term,” says Georgson.

“If you’re a smaller club, you’re left more alone. If you don’t have people questioning every little decision you make, then it’s also easier to make brave, innovative, risky decisions on how to do things. Because if they go wrong — which they sometimes do, if you want to be innovative — it’s not the end of the world. You’re not gonna get hanged or sacked because of this. I think this is a big strength of Brentford, and it comes from the owner all the way down to the players. Everyone knows what they’re about.”

As at Swansea, he was struck by how hard Brentford worked to look beyond surface results, and ensure this was underpinned by good processes. “At Brentford, it was confirmed to me that you have to understand the randomness of football to really be successful. If you’re constantly going to rely on the result of the game as your one provider of evaluation, you’re going to struggle to make an effective organisation.

“Because what you like as a person is structure: black and white. You want to see simple answers to complex situations. Time and time again, your backbone reaction is, ‘We lost, we’re shit’, or ‘We won, we’re great’. Every human being works that way. It’s a natural part of trying to create structure in this chaotic world.

“And in football, that’s part of the beauty of it: that adrenaline, the fact that one goal dictates heaven and hell. That release after a late winner, you cannot find anywhere else in life. But if you’re going to work in football, you have to love the adrenaline and the emotion, but understand that’s not going to define whether you’re good or bad. It’s a low-scoring sport, so one goal dictates so much of the story.

“If you’re going to have a super-efficient and good process, you have to be able to strip that away — and that’s very hard. It sounds easy from an intellectual level of discussion, but once you’re in there, and the media, the supporters, the whole world are judging you on that basis, it’s so easy to get sucked in. You need really strong foundations to withstand that.”

Georgson found those at Brentford. It was also there he met Jover, head coach Thomas Frank and director of football Rasmus Ankersen. When Jover joined Manchester City, Brentford offered Georgson his position as set piece specialist. At first, he was uncertain. “It was not really the direction I was expecting,” he explains. “At Malmo, I had done the analysis for attacking set pieces, but the head coach had assumed a lot of responsibility for that area. I knew the process, but I saw my next step as taking a broader picture.”

Brentford listened, and came back with a hybrid role: head of set pieces and individual development. Georgson knew taking on the set pieces role would mean immersing himself in the subject. “I knew I didn’t have loads of experience,” he says. “But, like everything in my life, I knew if I really put in the effort, I would learn it.”

He arrived in November 2019, after the Swedish season had finished. Brentford had been struggling with attacking set pieces, and Georgson’s impact was immediate: up until that November, they had one set-piece goal from 16 games. In the remainder of the season, they scored 16 set-piece goals from 34 matches.

That record caught the eye of Arteta, who had already moved to sign goalkeeping coach Inaki Cana from Brentford. After his first six months in north London, Arteta sought to bring in a set-piece specialist to complement his coaching team. For Georgson, the offer was impossible to turn down. “I was so impressed by Mikel in our discussions,” he says. “I just thought that this was an opportunity that would not come again — especially for a Swede with no background in playing.”

At Arsenal, Georgson’s role was more defined. “It was, very clearly, a set-piece role,” he explains. “Attacking set pieces, defensive set pieces and throw-ins were my responsibility.”

Georgson had never enjoyed the luxury of a regular pre-season in England. At Brentford, he joined partway through 2019-20. At Arsenal, the global pandemic meant a severely truncated summer break before last season began.

The role required some careful time-management. “My focus was 99 per cent on just managing my own process — it was hard with double gameweeks all the time. I just wanted to produce the level of detail I felt Arsenal deserved, and that Mikel deserved. He’s such a strong manager, he knew every detail of my process. That just makes you feel like you want to deliver, deliver and deliver.”

Studying set pieces is rarely, for any coach, a labour of love.

“I think if you’re going to be world-class at something, you need a strong passion for it,” says Georgson. “And there’s very little passion in this area to begin with. But once someone starts feeling, ‘OK, this is my little baby, I want to nurture it and make it as good as possible’, then there’s also a lot of unexplored potential in that area.”

Georgson was lucky that, in both Brentford and Arsenal, he found two clubs determined to improve in that aspect of the game. Every week, before every match, he was granted some time to work with the team on dead-ball scenarios.

While managers were enthused, convincing the players was not always so easy. “It’s very, very hard,” says Georgson. “If a player could choose, they would play five-a-side, with no instructions, at full-on power all the time. This type of training is quite far away from that.

“You can try to make it fun — a match-like, live situation where you compete. But then sometimes you have to take it slow, because it might be a situation where the player needs a bit of calm, for their technique or to focus on details. Ultimately, the main thing is when they see results. That’s how simple the human brain is.

“As a coach, it’s all about having the feeling for a training week. If you’re a specialist, then it’s easy to think, ‘I need more time in my specialist area’. But I don’t think that’s the way to think of specialists in football — the process has to be holistic, synchronised.

“If the team at that moment will take more from a big tactical preparation of the game, with the focus on open play, then my job as a specialist is to say, ‘OK, at this time, it would be good to have 15 minutes. But for the team now, it’s better that it’s eight (minutes). And then I have to make the most of those eight minutes, not try to achieve everything, and just focus on the one or two things that I think will be the most important at this point for the process to move forward.”

Georgson gives instructions to Arsenal’s Emile Smith Rowe (Photo: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

That is the nature of the role: six minutes here, eight minutes there. Consequently, progress is incremental.

“You have to see it as a long-term project,” says Georgson. “So even if I don’t get everything I wanted done by the second gameweek, I accept that we build it block by block. A big part of the job is not getting desperate, and accepting that, over time, we will improve. That’s why we had good results at Brentford — because there were so many bricks in place from previous seasons. It wasn’t like starting from zero. It was easy for me to step in and do the detailed work I wanted, because the foundations were in place.”

At Arsenal, Georgson’s job was to lay those foundations. His impact in north London was more defensive than offensive: Arsenal conceded just six goals from dead-ball situations last season, down from 15 the previous year. At the other end of the pitch, however, they scored only six goals from set pieces in 2020-21 — a tally they have already matched three months into this season, leading to widespread praise of new appointment Jover. It is interesting though that Arteta has referred several times to Jover’s work as part of “a process” — one Arsenal began over a year ago, with Georgson.

A big part of the job is research. At both Brentford and Arsenal, Georgson worked closely with a video analyst. He also worked with data, at times taking painstaking hours to compile his own. While there is some focus on the opposition, the majority of the time is spent analysing the team’s own performance at set pieces.

Defensively, all teams adopt one of three strategies: “Zonal marking, man-marking, or a hybrid system,” says Georgson. “That’s more or less what it is. Teams pick something, and then are usually 100 per cent consistent in that for the whole season. They keep working on it — unless it goes really bad, or they change the coach.

“All the defensive systems have their strengths and weaknesses. You know your weakness areas, and it’s likely your opponent knows them too. There are no big secrets. Then you have to be proactive with your weaknesses to try and improve them, or predict how the opponent will try to capitalise. But no system is perfect. It’s like a blanket that’s too short: wherever you move it, you’re going to be cold somewhere.”

In attack, time constraints mean it’s unlikely any Premier League team will have a long list of set-piece routines. “It’s not like American football, where the quarterback is used to keeping 200 plays in his head. It’s a different situation in football, that’s not the traditional culture. If you look at some of the strongest teams in set pieces, it’s not like they’ll have 100 plays. They might have surprisingly few, but they’re just very efficient. You don’t have to have more than two.”

There were times last season when Georgson appeared to be signalling routines to the players from the sidelines. “You find ways to communicate,” he says. “But sometimes it’s very hard, because of noise or adrenaline. Also, sometimes the players feel the game better, they see the opportunities that I cannot see from the side. It’s good to improvise, but to improvise from nothing is very hard. We try to give them a framework.”

The Athletic makes sure to ask Georgson about that bane of many fans’ existence — the short corner.

Arsenal’s success this season has come from direct deliveries, and many are pleased to see the back of the short-ball routines. “It’s the same at Malmo,” he chuckles. “The supporters even made a Facebook group trying to ban short corners!”

Nevertheless, an explanation is forthcoming.

“If you have five players who are 190cm (6ft 3in) or more, maybe you should kick every ball into the box. But if you only have one, he will probably meet the strongest marker, so the likelihood of scoring reduces.

“In all three organisations I’ve been in — Malmo, Brentford and Arsenal — when we analysed our set pieces we saw that the short corner was an effective approach, especially compared to just kicking it into the box. It’s an effective way to create a goalscoring chance either in the first action, or more often in the second or third.

“A short corner creates some chaos from the rigid system the defence will be trying to produce. As soon as you go into a second or third phase, there’s a bigger risk that defensive players don’t know their roles. The system fails a little bit, because at some point the set-piece organisation has to move into an open-play organisation. And when that transition happens, some players might do it earlier and some later, which means the synchronisation of the team is at risk — and that is when you are vulnerable.”

Interestingly, goal kicks did not come under Georgson’s remit — at both Brentford and Arsenal, they were coached as part of open play. Georgson sounds relieved. “It’s the hardest situation in football, from an attacking point of view,” he says. “If you kick the ball long, it’s not so hard — but then you lose it often. But if you want to play from goal, it’s the hardest. And the defenders have the biggest advantage. They can set the press, the trigger is so clear — on the pass. And if they win it, they’re very close to the opponent’s goal.”

After a season at Arsenal, and two in England, Malmo came to Georgson with an attractive offer: to become their next sporting director, aged just 39.

At Malmo, he will work alongside their outgoing sporting director, Daniel Andersson. He and Georgson have considerable shared history, having studied for their Pro Licence together, and Andersson will show him the ropes before completing a handover and stepping up to become head of football. Georgson admits he has a good deal to learn about the business of the game — particularly when it comes to transfers and negotiations. What he brings to the table are international connections and experience of best practice.

Malmo provide a particular challenge. “It’s an interesting position. In the Swedish market, we are the biggest. Our turnover is a lot higher than even that of the second club, and the quality of the squad is the best. We’re a big fish in a small pond.

“That brings some advantages in the player and staff market. We are very attractive and we want to capitalise on that position, without becoming fat and lazy. In this context, we’re a little bit like Arsenal — a big player with great possibilities to compete on a high level.

“In the European context, however, we’re a bit like Brentford. With less resources, we need to beat bigger wallets. Every time we step into European competition, we have to be more clever, more innovative, more brave in how we use the resources we have. So the challenge is to be able to do both of these roles without losing our identity.”

Georgson has already done significant work on the club’s youth scouting. “A lot of the time at youth level, the players are at such different stages in their development,” he explains. “Some get physical and cognitive maturity very early. Anyone can spot the guy that’s six foot tall, jumps highest, runs fastest, shoots hardest and scores three goals every game. We call it ‘Grandma scouting’, because even your grandma could do it. But it takes a lot of experience to spot the boy in that under-13 team whose body and mind are still really only 11, but that, when he’s 18, 20, or 22, will have a skill set that can help him compete on a world-class level.”

Malmo’s emphasis on youth development is already bearing fruit.

While the senior team have endured a tough Champions League group, losing all four matches so far without scoring a goal, their youth teams are impressing. “It fills me with pride that at academy level we have played very tight competitive games against Zenit, Juventus and Chelsea this season — fantastic, developing football where we are not just standing back defending low, taking no risks with or without the ball. We are really going out to try to affect the game with a high press when we can, to build through their press and to create chances from our own qualities.

“Development comes first. But you still want to win, and to win in the right way — the way that promotes player development. So we never like to compromise on the instinct of winning your duel or winning your match. That’s the essence of football.

“You have to keep two thoughts in your mind: we can play in a development-friendly way, and train that way. But at the same time, we can be really tough to beat and really challenge and compete for every situation in the game, and be really happy when we win and really angry when we lose. That’s the soul of the game. We should never take that away.”

There is an obvious question: Does he plan to introduce a set-pieces coach at Malmo?

“In time,” he says. “Malmo is a different size of club and organisation. You have to ask, ‘Is the organisation mature enough to really capitalise on the person in that role?’ Change shouldn’t be forced; you should plan carefully. We will get there.”

Given Georgson’s trajectory thus far, you can’t help but believe him.

Edited 4 August, 2023 by Convict Colony

[ErwinK1961]

Thanks CC, very interesting. Seems a bit of a coup for a Championship team, our set pieces have been largely crap at both ends.

[Convict Colony]

5 minutes ago, ErwinK1961 said:

Thanks CC, very interesting. Seems a bit of a coup for a Championship team, our set pieces have been largely crap at both ends.

thats what i thought, we have been terrible and the turnaround he had managed at brentford below bodes well for us especially in our league, guess its the personal touch from Rasmus that got him for us.

"Georgson’s impact was immediate: up until that November, they had one set-piece goal from 16 games. In the remainder of the season, they scored 16 set-piece goals from 34 matches."

[Badger]

Good read and encouraging.

On the subject of short corners though, I always thought Alan Ball invented or at least patented them. Fair point about the height of players in the box, added to which the RM possession football might also mean we see a few of them this season.

[HarvSFC]

Sorry Andreas, but our long throw "specialist" has just left for Monaco.

[SNSUN]

1 minute ago, HarvSFC said:

Sorry Andreas, but our long throw "specialist" has just left for Monaco.

If a long throw is genetic, Hull have a hell of a player on their hands!

[davefizzy14]

This sounds like an outstanding addition to the coaching staff. Good news. 

[HarvSFC]

Seems to be leaving: https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/23995177.southampton-coach-andreas-georgson-set-leave-club/

[CB Fry]

The wheels are coming off.

[Wade Garrett]

I don’t think it’s a huge loss to be honest.

Good luck to him though.

[Convict Colony]

32 minutes ago, Wade Garrett said:

I don’t think it’s a huge loss to be honest.

Good luck to him though.

Have you not seen how much better our set pieces have been over the last 6 or so games ? and how fast we always try to take them.

 

[rooney]

18 hours ago, Convict Colony said:

Have you not seen how much better our set pieces have been over the last 6 or so games ? and how fast we always try to take them.

 

Didnt score many goals from our 15 corners V Blackburn though.

[Saint Fan CaM]

Perhaps the guy was brought in on a short term consultancy type contract? Think there has been a bit of an improvement - not much but perhaps enough. As we know it can take a long time for new ideas to embed themselves into the squads consciousness and understanding. Or perhaps he’s been found out to not bring enough to the table. One thing is for certain is it’s unlikely he’ll be missed too much.

[Convict Colony]

2 hours ago, rooney said:

Didnt score many goals from our 15 corners V Blackburn though.

the fact we scored a goal from a corner is win in itself 🤣