Yet not every club feels the same. Tottenham, under Ange Postecoglou, do not have a specialist set-piece coach and, since the beginning of last season, Spurs have conceded more set piece goals (excluding penalties) than every Premier League team, except for Nottingham Forest.
At Chelsea Mauricio Pochettino didn’t have a set-piece coach, believing he did not need one, before the Blues hired Cueva with a new set-piece department being set up at Stamford Bridge.
That particular issue was one of the reasons for Chelsea replacing Pochettino with Enzo Maresca in the summer.
There needs to be buy-in for the position to work, and Austin MacPhee was one of the only staff kept on when Unai Emery replaced Steven Gerrard at Aston Villa two years ago.
Given how hands-on Emery is, it is a seal of approval in itself.
MacPhee – who joined Villa from Midtjylland in 2021 – was also Scotland’s set-piece coach but stepped down last month to spend more time with his ill father.
He has been credited with Villa’s improved set-pieces and last season they became the first team in Europe to score 20 goals from set plays.
Former Northern Ireland boss Ian Baraclough worked with MacPhee for the national side between 2020 and 2021.
He said: “Austin was innovative. I gave him free reign and it was a good relationship. He was very strong in his beliefs on things. Sometimes you may have to pull the reins on it, but the majority of the time you could see things working.
“It’s just whether you’ve got enough time to work on that but I’m not surprised he’s at Aston Villa and doing well. He communicates very well and he’s one of the standouts in the Premier League when it comes to that role.”
Though Baraclough rightly points out set-pieces have not suddenly become important – they have always been worked on, but have become more inventive.
“Now you have something like the draught excluder,” he said.
“That was something we deployed in Bosnia (in 2020). I hadn’t seen it before and Austin came to me and said ‘what about this? I’ve seen this at Atletico Madrid’.
“We were one of the first British sides to use it and the players were thinking ‘what’s all this about?’ You could see them laughing and giggling. It was Paddy McNair we used on the floor, it’s genius really.”
As teams increasingly focus on the fine margins, former Blackburn and England striker Chris Sutton emphasises how focus on set-pieces is nothing new.
He said: “The difference in the past was that managers who wanted to work on them, did so themselves.
“I get how the game has evolved since then with the new technology that is available, but it is like these things and ideas did not exist back in the day, when they definitely did.”