Serie A has always had a reputation for tactical sophistication and a corresponding reputation for being slow to adopt analytics-driven specialisation. The set-piece coach revolution that started in the Premier League around 2019 took its time getting to Italy. In 2026 it’s finally here in a serious way, and the table is being rearranged because of it.

What’s changed

Three years ago, a Serie A club would typically have a head coach, a couple of assistants, a goalkeeping coach, and maybe a fitness coach. Set pieces were handled by whichever assistant happened to be drawing things on a whiteboard. The dedicated set-piece coach role barely existed in Italian football outside of a couple of progressive clubs.

The 2025-26 season has at least 12 of the 20 Serie A clubs with explicitly named set-piece coaches on staff. The remaining clubs have set-piece responsibilities formally allocated to a specific assistant rather than left vague. The shift has happened in a single season, driven partly by the success of clubs that adopted earlier and partly by the analytics departments at most clubs producing internal reports that made the case impossible to ignore.

Sky Sport Italia covered this transition in a feature in February that I thought was the best mainstream piece on the topic. The numbers they cited were striking: clubs with dedicated set-piece coaches were averaging 0.4 more goals per match from set situations than clubs without, which over a season works out to a margin that decides league positions.

Where Roma sits

The Giallorossi added a dedicated set-piece coach in the summer 2025 transition. The early-season returns were modest — set-piece goals were marginally up but the routines looked tentative. By the second half of the season, the patterns have become clearly identifiable and the data is rewarding.

Roma’s most distinctive routine has been the short corner that draws defenders to the near post before delivering a delayed cross to the back post for a third-man run. This has produced multiple goals across the second half of the season and is now being copied by other Serie A clubs. The variation Roma added late in the season, where the third-man run is replaced by a near-post flick-on header, has caught defences off-guard a few times.

The defensive set-piece work has been less visible but arguably more important. Roma have conceded fewer goals from corners than at any point in the last five seasons, which is the kind of structural improvement that doesn’t make headlines but absolutely shows up in the points total.

The Italian press’s blind spot

Italian football media has been slow to cover this shift in detail, which I think is partly because it requires a kind of analytical writing that the mainstream Italian press hasn’t traditionally done. The English-language football analytics community has been writing about set-piece efficiency for years. The Italian equivalent is mostly limited to a few specialist sites and the occasional in-depth piece in the major papers.

The Athletic has done some good work on Italian set-piece patterns over the last 12 months that you wouldn’t easily find equivalent coverage for in Italian. This is a genuine gap in Italian football journalism that I hope gets filled in the next couple of years as a younger generation of writers comes through.

Inter and Napoli’s contrasting approaches

The two clubs at the top of Serie A have taken different paths on set pieces and the results are revealing.

Inter have been at the front of the set-piece curve in Italy for several seasons, with a dedicated coach who came from Belgian football and brought a more aggressive aerial approach. Their corner routines feature complex blocking patterns that are right at the edge of what referees will allow before calling fouls, and their conversion rate from corners is the best in the league.

Napoli have taken a different approach, focused more on creating space through movement than through blocking. Their corners often start with apparent disorganisation that resolves into a deliberate pattern in the final two seconds before delivery. The conversion rate is lower than Inter’s but the unpredictability has made them harder to defend.

The contrast is interesting because both approaches are working. There isn’t a single right answer to set-piece design. There are coherent answers and incoherent answers, and most Serie A clubs have spent years offering incoherent answers. The 2026 step-change is the broad shift toward coherence.

The lower-half implications

The clubs in the relegation fight are where set-piece coaching is most consequential. When you’re playing for survival, the matches you actually win are often decided by single set-piece moments. A club like Empoli or Lecce has a smaller margin for error in open play because the squad quality gap is real, but on a corner kick the playing field is closer to even.

Several lower-half clubs have made set-piece improvement a central part of their tactical identity in 2025-26. Verona’s set-piece numbers are dramatically better than their open-play expected goals would suggest, and it’s been the difference between their current league position and being already-relegated.

Corriere della Sera ran a piece in late April on Verona’s tactical setup that I’d recommend if you want a deeper read on how the lower-half clubs are using set pieces strategically.

The defensive specialisation arms race

The other side of the set-piece coaching spread is that defending set pieces has gotten harder because the attacking routines have gotten more sophisticated. Goalkeepers are now spending significant practice time on specific opponent patterns that wouldn’t have existed five years ago. Centre-backs are being assigned to specific opponents on specific routines based on detailed video analysis.

The training time allocation has shifted accordingly. Top-flight Serie A clubs are now spending an estimated 15-20% of weekly training time on set-piece work, up from 5-8% a decade ago. The minutes have come from somewhere — typically open-play tactical drilling — and there’s an argument that this is part of why open-play football in Serie A has felt stylistically narrower in 2026.

What this means going forward

The set-piece arms race in Serie A is just getting started. The Premier League went through this curve and the result was that set-piece work continued increasing in sophistication for at least five years before plateauing. Italian football is at the start of that curve.

For Roma fans, the encouraging thing is that the club committed early in the cycle. The improvements visible across the second half of 2025-26 should compound into 2026-27 as the routines bed in further and the new players signed for next season are integrated into the existing patterns. Set pieces won’t decide everything — the open-play football still has to work — but they’ll be a more reliable source of points than they’ve been in years.

Forza Roma.

Luca Bianchi