The St. Gallen Save: Set Piece...Specialists?

In this series I'm trying to bring together all elements of Football Manager as part of a cohesive strategy aimed at propelling St. Gallen to the top of Swiss football & beyond. I'm not an expert in any aspect of the game, but there are some parts I know less about, or have ignored all together. The aim of this series is to learn & improve as I go...

This post is dedicated to one of the areas of the game I've neglected the most - set pieces. I've never been bothered enough about them to spend any significant length of time planning and tweaking my routines, and when I did they were never really that successful.

But real world football shows time & time again how important dead ball situations can be, ofen the difference in tight games when 0 points can become 1, or 1 can become 3 in the blink of an eye. There was the famous situation a couple of years ago in Denmark, where unfancied Midtjylland maximised their effectiveness from these situations and won the League title.

We've even seen clubs now hiring dedicated coaches for set pieces, and even situations like throw-ins. With that in mind, I wanted to explore the importance of set pieces and why they can be a vital part of your strategy.

And during the process of assessing my squad on Day One in the job, one player changed everything...

Meet Matej

As I clicked through each of the player profiles, carefully running my eyes over their attributes and trying to build a picture of their strengths, weaknesses and suitability for my preferred tactical style, one player stood out like a sore thumb. Meet Matej Maglica.

Matej Maglica is a 6'6" Croatian defender who spend the early part of his career in the German lower Leagues, before Stuttgart took a punt on him. After just 1 Bundesliga appearance, he was loaned to St. Gallen in Switzerland, and made enough of an impression for the club to make the move permanent in the Summer of 2022.

Matej is a bit slow, he's not great on the ball and some of his mental attributes are certainly nothing to write home about. In terms of building a team that aims to play out from the back and defend in a high line - he's not ideal.

But, as you can see, Maglica has an enormous and obvious upside. His aerial power. With Strength of 18, Jumping Reach of 18 and Heading of 17 he gives us a completely different option in defence. And with those attributes, it would be borderline negligent to ignore the potential for attacking dead ball situations.

And so, I set about attempting to put together some coherent set piece routines. Free kick situations have yet to bear any fruit, but corners have been a completely different story, and below is my corner set-up.

Left-footed Spaniard Jordi Quintilla is my preferred choice for corner kicks, and from the left-hand side I ask him to whip balls into the near post where he would aim at, surprise surprise, Maglica. I thought that if he aimed at the far post with an outswinger the ball would end up too far away from the goal, thus making the goal-scoring chance that bit more difficult.

From the right, I wanted a more looping, inswinging cross into the back post again, aiming for our giant centre-back. The idea is to drag defenders towards the front post and leave the big man free at the back post to tower over unsuspecting opponents and batter the ball into the back of the net.

When he scored in the 12th minute of a friendly against FC Thun, I knew I was onto a winner. And he didn't stop there.

In the first half of the season, the big man scored in a 1-0 win vs Young Boys (A), 2-1 win vs Lugano (A), 1-1 draw with Servette (A), 2-1 win vs Lugano (H) & 3-2 win vs Grasshopper (H). WIthout his goals in these matches, we'd have gotten 4 points. With his crucial set piece finishes - we turned 4 points into 13!

By the time the World Cup rolled around, Maglica had scored 10 goals from the first 16 League matches. He was the Leagues 3rd top scorer at that stage, which was just crazy. And he didn't stop there.

He added a further 12 set piece goals, and finished the season as second top scorer with 22 League goals - just 1 behind Mario Balotelli!

So, my defender finished the season as my top scorer by quite some distance, netting 23 times in 37 matches. We scored 23 goals from corners this season, but only 3 from indirect free kicks, so there is definitely room for improvement next season. The following season, Maglica plundered another 20 goals from 26 matches, before earning a €17.5m move to Premier League side, Leicester City.

Next time, I'll be discussing how I tried to tackle training and my approach throughout the season. Thanks for reading!