What the Specialism Says About Where Advantages Live
The instructive part of the set-piece coach's rise is that the opportunity was never hidden. Every club could see the dead ball, everyone had access to the same footage, and the tactical ideas involved were not secret. What was missing was the decision to treat a controllable phase as worth a dedicated professional's full attention. That is a resource-allocation insight rather than a tactical one, and it generalises. As specialists become standard across the game, the attacking edge compresses, and the differentiation moves to defending routines that are now designed by people who do nothing else.
