Interview with Pep Clotet: Secrets Behind Set Piece Success

Today our guest is Birmingham City assistant manager Pep Clotet.

Pep is from Catalonia and has been a coach since 2001. I'll give you a quick overview of his career.

He started as a youth team and reserve manager at Espanyol before moving to coach in Sweden and Norway. After that he returned to Spain to manage the reserves at Malaga. He then joined Garry Monk at Swansea and since then he has coached with Leeds and now at Birmingham City.

In this episode we discuss:

• how he approaches set-pieces

• key performance indicators he looks for at Birmingham City

• how English football is resembling Spanish football

• why football should switch to 12 players

• advice for young coaches

• coaching in Norway

You can reach out to Pep on Twitter, his handle is @Pepclotet.

Listen

Timeline

8:35 Camping at Bayern Munich

19:45 Coaching in Norway

24:58 On getting sacked from Oxford

29:45 Coaching set-pieces

40:50 Emerging trends in football

48:02 Developing young players

Highlights

• What we do is really not rocket science... Football is about having a way of doing things that you stick to, and that you just develop and develop and develop. And eventually it yields.

Everything is cut into chunks of 5 minutes, and in those five minutes we only count how many final third entries did we get and how many final entries did they get.

• So sooner in the future we are going to see a more balanced mix, we are going to see teams that are more difficult to beat each other, and everyone can beat each other, because there is a lot of people playing football... the pool is better, and coaches are working out all of the details.

I would always advise them [coaches] to always see the best in their players because we never know who makes it.

• We are seeing more tactical awareness on blocking the space, because if you go against a team higher up the pitch you might leave yourself a lot of space in behind that they can use. So I start to see a trend on reshaping that space and not letting the opposition use that space against the pressing