Much has been made of a perceived ugliness returning to English football – the set-piece culture engulfing the Premier League, the NFL-style playbooks and the scrums inside six-yard boxes at corners and free-kicks.
Arsenal and Mikel Arteta are the main exponents, with 19 goals from dead-ball situations this season in the league, while only conceding seven. The land of the giants, a major factor in what fuels their title charge as they hunt for a first crown in a generation.
The obsession is nothing new for Arteta, who convinced Pep Guardiola to bring the now revered but then lesser-known Nicolas Jover to Manchester City in 2019, a matter of months before Arteta was appointed to the top job at the Emirates Stadium.
It was seen as a real area for improvement and a way to supplement an eye-catching style and Jover managed that progression across two years, before leaving to link back up with Arteta at Arsenal in 2021. With the proper specialist gone, nobody was left to fill the void.
A bright young coach in the academy, Carlos Vicens, had won the Youth Cup with Cole Palmer, Morgan Rogers and Liam Delap’s cohort. Txiki Begiristain decided to interview his Under 18s boss for the job. He had a stipulation for his fellow Spaniard about set-pieces.
‘Txiki told me I was going to have to do that if I wanted to be part of the coaching staff,’ says Vicens, now in his first senior No 1 job at Braga, fourth in the Portuguese top flight and in the Europa League quarter-finals after turning around their tie with Feyenoord last night. ‘It gave me the pressure of having to do them well for Pep. You don’t want to let him down.’
Carlos Vicens with (from left) fellow Manchester City coach Enzo Maresca, boss Pep Guardiola and assistant manager Rodolfo Borrell in 2022
Vicens holds an interesting Premier League record from his Manchester City days
He stepped up to the role of set-piece specialist at City after Nicolas Jover (above) left the Etihad to reunite with Mikel Arteta at Arsenal
Although not his forte, Vicens remarks that Spanish coaches – particularly in the lower leagues – are fixated on set-pieces. In the third and fourth tier at Majorcan side Llosetense close to home, he worked under a coach in Nico Lopez who leant heavily on corners.
For a man who spent his formative coaching years even lower in the regional divisions, taking his own camera to film the opposition for scouting reports as a one-man band, Vicens was ready for anything. Spending weeks combing through different routines, Vicens then embarked on the best season ever in terms of set-pieces in the Premier League.
No team has ever posted a larger disparity between goals scored from set-pieces and conceded in a single campaign than City in 2021-22, helping them to 93 points and an eighth English league title.
Guardiola’s City, the set-piece kings. Who would have thought? Vicens presided over 21 goals scored – Aymeric Laporte topping the charts with four – with their backline, led by Laporte, Ruben Dias and John Stones, breached just once. City won the title by a point from Liverpool on the final day. That was achieved without rucks or mauls, with only 10 minutes of dedicated training the day before a match, just a couple of routines in the bag. This was simplicity and a record that has not yet been beaten.
‘We conceded just one goal, away at Aston Villa – I remember that,’ says Vicens, who would perhaps be best served remembering Bernardo Silva’s stunning volley on the counter-attack instead that won them the match. ‘We still won, so luckily I didn’t cost us any points!
‘That was the season before Erling (Haaland). We didn’t always have the tallest team. I always encouraged them, like Ruben or John, to channel the passion they had in open play – celebrating defensive actions – and they realised its importance.
‘I said to imagine if you guys are so good at defending in open play and set-pieces: you’ll be unbelievable. They bought into it. When elite players see that you give them help, they always buy in because they are competitive monsters.’
Vicens – who inspired Kevin De Bruyne’s famous corner routine, where he whipped the ball across the byline to the near post for Stones to score at Anfield in 2024 – reveals that the changing nature of set-plays in the Premier League saw City use more zonal defenders with each passing year.
Ruben Dias heads home against Newcastle in December 2021 during their record-setting set-piece season
John Stones turns the ball in from Kevin De Bruyne’s clever near-post corner routine against rivals Liverpool in 2024
One season they reinforced the front post and the next decided to clog up the back post. It’s why you’ll often see every player back in their own box to defend these days.
‘A very important part of the job is to neutralise the opponent,’ Vicens says. ‘For that you need to study. It takes time but you need to condense that in what you show the players. I was very conscious about not bombarding them with too much info.
‘You’re not working for any coach, you’re working for Pep. He is very demanding in how much information the players need to process. They need to listen. I was very keen on not giving them too much. You have to filter what you show them.’
Vicens knows a fair bit about studying. Just the three degrees to his name. Economics from the University of the Balearic Islands while still playing – the central midfielder retired as a semi-pro at 27 – and turning down an offer from former City striker Adrian Heath to go professional with new franchise Austin Aztex in 2008 during a year abroad at the University of Texas.
Then there were two Masters during his first season at City, when effectively on work experience with the Under 12s in the academy after sending in a blind CV. One in Portugal, featuring a lecture from former student Jose Mourinho, and another devised by Barcelona’s legendary sports scientist Paco Seirullo, who worked with every coach at the Nou Camp from Johan Cruyff to Luis Enrique.
Until taking the leap towards City, Vicens taught economics while coaching. Presumably that helped when working through what could be quite monotonous set-piece drills with multi-millionaires.
‘After the meeting in the locker room, I always went around to every individual player,’ says Vicens. ‘I know the meeting will last 15 minutes – or 14 minutes, I tried to reduce it – and I wanted to make sure the information was being received.
‘You know this when you sit down with them. You realise he might need more of this or that when delivering information. It also made me close to the players and that can help them from a mindset point of view.’
Vicens is now the head coach of Braga in Portugal where he has been pitting his wits against Jose Mourinho and his Benfica team
Guardiola and Vicens talk tactics during their time together at City
Vicens joined Braga last summer and is the latest of Guardiola’s City proteges to jump into management, after Arteta, Enzo Maresca and Brian Barry-Murphy. He’s opted against asking his old boss for favours.
They did speak in August and around Christmas but Braga’s schedule is as relentless as City’s – Vicens had 10 matches in his first month and it has barely let up. How he speaks is eerily similar to the sort of methodology Guardiola put forward in his own first year at the Etihad Stadium.
‘Pep always said the same thing: “Be true to yourself, the gut feeling tells you and usually it is right”,’ says Vicens, whose Braga side have lost once in the league since mid-December and beat Mourinho’s Benfica in the cup. ‘He trusts his gut and intuition. He’s transmitted that to me.
‘I knew I was going to be a head coach again. You’re writing things down, creating this list of ideas for culture when you’re chasing perfection. It’s what I’m trying here. The target is always become better, become better, and that is what I learned with him. Everything you do in the building needs to be super elite. Little by little, you can see you are doing things better.’
