It started with a codename: ‘Cortland’.
To most, a small county in New York. To the University of Sherbrooke’s soccer team in 2008, the trigger word at corner kicks.
The Quebec-based players had visited Cortland in pre-season, but christening corner routines with surreptitious names was not a ploy manager Richard Pierre-Gilles had employed before.
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That is because it arrived along with player-turned-coach Nicolas Jover, now Arsenal’s league-leading set-piece mastermind.
“I was looking for a third coach and asked Nico as he was a nifty player who I formed a close relationship with when he was voted captain in his last year,” Pierre-Gilles tells The Athletic.
“He did the same general coaching as us, but he also did some set pieces for us. I gave him carte blanche and said this was the best laboratory he could wish for.
“Whatever he brought to the table, we would apply it and he could fine-tune it. He painstakingly designed these routes and mapped out four or five different plays. The drawings had the explanation in French with some patterns of runs and the sequencing.
“I was a little hesitant initially because I was thinking about American football, but I realised that is precisely what he was doing: integrating North American culture into European football.
“It was about decoys and deception — what we would say in French, fausse piste.”
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Pierre-Gilles has remained a close friend and recently came across Jover’s sketches when cleaning out his basement. They may have been basic compared to his Arsenal designs and set pieces may not have been his focus at this point, but it was the precursor to the career he would eventually take up eight years later.
The sophistication of the choreography has undoubtedly increased in the 13 years he has spent in professional football, working with Montpellier, Croatia, Brentford, Manchester City and Arsenal.
Jover was born in Berlin, raised in France and moved to Canada in his early twenties to study for a sports degree, courtesy of the link between the University of Montpellier and Sherbrooke. It has become an attractive proposition for young students looking to learn English with the comfort of living in a French-speaking area.
It was a path Adrien Durand, now a football agent, followed. He spent Jover’s final year as a player at Sherbrooke alongside him.
“You could be jealous when a new French guy arrives as he was the king, but he welcomed me and helped me understand everything,” says Durand.
“He was a really intelligent player, but he didn’t have the mobility as he had busted his knee a couple of times. He watched everywhere before he got the ball like a No 10.
“When I was leaving Sherbrooke in 2008, he was already telling me about how he wanted to buy this data platform and develop it to be used in football. I thought he was crazy and said it couldn’t work in Europe. Now I have presidents asking me if he can come to their team to work for a week.”
After studying for a master’s degree, Jover joined Dynamik de Sherbrooke, a newly established amateur club in the region, but he was not content to just be a piece of the jigsaw. He was appointed as their first technical director.
“There were no pro academies in the region back then and I’m pretty sure there weren’t any in the entire country. Nico ran it like it was a pro club though,” says Nicholas Gagnon, a former team-mate and scout who was later inspired by Jover to become a set-piece coach.
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“He convinced most of the best coaches in the region to join his club and it was a really good programme in a small amount of time. It was really advanced as we were manually tracking stats at Dynamik.”
Jover is described as quiet, not someone who needs to be the centre of attention. Yet he had the force of personality to sell his idea to coaches older and more experienced than him.
“Nico is not the type to dominate conversations, but when he speaks, he pauses and ponders. He’s a very reflective guy, but when he coaches he becomes a different person,” says Pierre-Gilles.
“He has this assertiveness that you don’t see when having a beer. He is an academic when it comes to presenting, but he can be authoritative, too.”
Jover returned to Montpellier with the dream of breaking into professional football. The issue was that there was no established route to follow. He had bought himself a laptop and invested in software to develop his skill set as a performance analyst, but without a playing career, he required an inside man.
He found one at a coaching course. Pascal Baills played more than 200 times for Montpellier and returned to the club in 2006 as assistant manager. He and Jover established a relationship and he was impressed by his work, but it was only months later when Rene Girard took over as manager before the new season that Baills set up a meeting.
Jover impressed, but his six years at Montpellier were dedicated solely to video analysis. It was around 2012 that he started to forensically study set pieces, but he was not on the grass coaching them. Those bespoke routines were saved for Brentford.
Gianni Vio, who pioneered the role of set-piece coach at Catania in 2008, spent a year working in west London during the 2015-16 season. When he left Brentford — whose outside-of-the-box thinking had extended to a head of philosophy role as well as a ball-striking coach — they were looking for a replacement and Jover made his interest known.
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“I interviewed Nico and just really liked him straight away. He was so meticulous and studious over everything,” says Charlotte manager Dean Smith, who was in charge of Brentford between 2015 and 2018.
“When he first started, he was really good in the meeting rooms for the analysis. He was showing the different ideas he had seen work. Initially, he found it hard to transition his confidence onto the grass, but then he found his forte, which was one-on-one with the players. From the moment he sang his initiation song, the lads were having him.”
Set-piece practice in Smith’s playing days was typically the domain of the goalkeeping coach last thing on a Friday. They were an afterthought and one that players typically viewed as a chore due to the mundane nature of standing around most of the time, but he gave Jover three or four different time slots throughout the week to work with smaller groups of players.
“John Egan scored a couple of goals in the first couple of games from corners,” says Smith. “That helped very quickly get buy-in from the players.
“Players have become reliant on looking at their numbers, so when they started realising that if they got a first contact or were part of the second contact they would get an assist or a pre-assist, their eyes lit up.
“We used colours as signals a lot. It’s funny, whenever one of our former players was playing against us, we could hear them saying, ‘It’s red, he’s going to be going here’, or ‘It’s blue, it is going to go here’, but we would change it up.”
Brentford were once closely aligned with Danish club Midtjylland as both were owned by Smartodds founder Matthew Benham (Benham sold his stake in Midtjylland in August). When Mads Buttgereit, now set-piece coach with the German national team, was appointed as Jover’s counterpart in Scandinavia in 2017, they were instructed by the club’s co-director of football, Rasmus Ankersen, to create a set-piece taskforce and share strategies.
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“When I watched Nico, Brentford were thinking more than us,” Buttgereit says. “They were playing more matches and couldn’t train that much, so he brought a computer screen onto the pitch to visualise it better as they trained.
“You need to be careful not to overcomplicate things for the players, but the details make the difference. That’s what Nico showed me. He is so respected by players because he has such passion for it and the players can feel it.”
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The culture at the top level of football can still be conservative, but Jover’s techniques at Brentford immediately won over Spanish midfielder Jota, one of Brentford’s main set-piece takers when Jover arrived.
“When he showed how he interpreted the weak points on the video, you saw it so easily,” says Jota. “By day three, we believed in his abilities and techniques.
“He transmitted the idea so quickly to the players. Ten minutes in the TV room and then 15 minutes on the pitch and everyone had it clear in their mind. We’d then have five minutes after the manager’s team talk and the patterns would be on the changing-room wall.
“We had three or four different variations each week, so in some sessions, it was just the takers landing the ball on a cone. He told us not to worry about the other part. He wanted perfection. We did not have a five-metre zone, it had to be exactly there. I had practised enough that I knew it would be the perfect ball and who would score.”
Jover was not dictatorial. Instead, he convinced the players first by showing them videos of the opposition’s weaknesses. But when it came to implementing them in-game, he started to give more autonomy to the players.
“Sometimes he felt the takers didn’t have full vision of the box, so the person at the edge of the area started to decide (which routine),” Jota says. “Every week we changed the signal as some weeks we repeated the same movement. One hand could be for the front post or one hand in my sock. He would let us come up with them the day before.
“I would joke to him that when he went to a big team he needed to pay me a personal tax!”
Brentford recorded 46 set-piece goals in his three seasons there and the prediction of bigger and better things came true when he moved to Manchester City in the summer of 2019.
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He was introduced to the club by Mikel Arteta, then City assistant, who had taken notice of Jover’s work at Brentford.
“Arteta was the one who called him to his villa in the Balearic islands,” says Pierre-Gilles.
“They spent a few hours together where they hit it off and Arteta decided he was his guy. His wife is Argentinian, so they both speak Spanish, French and English and had this connection.”
Pep Guardiola is understood to have made his coldness towards set pieces clear when he first arrived at the club in 2016, but it was a club decision to hire a set-piece coach and he was on board with it.
Jover’s work ethic was picked up on, with him being one of the first people into the training ground. He would spend hours in his office, located in the analysis area, poring over video.
Only City assistant Juanma Lillo’s 6am starts outdid Jover in the ‘crazy’ stakes as the boards and magnets on the wall made his office look like a science lab. Football is not an exact science, though, and City’s output at set pieces did not significantly improve.
They conceded a few similar goals from corners and there was a sense inside the building that Jover did not have the optimum amount of time to train set pieces compared to the time spent on build-up play and pressing.
Arteta left to take over at Arsenal in December 2019, just six months after Jover arrived, which did not help ease the pressure of working at a big club for the first time.
“In January, he took off to Germany for a week or so to clear his head and find his footing a little. We touched base slightly after that pilgrimage and after that, things really strengthened,” says Pierre-Gilles.
City won the title in his second season and reached the Champions League final, but he left the club at the end of his contract in 2021. His reunion with Arteta at Arsenal was not always nailed on, though, as Smith confirmed that he tried to take him to Villa. That is when Arteta swooped in to convince him that Arsenal was the place for him.
Things may not have clicked for Jover at City, but that experience is likened by one person who worked at the club at the time to a player who goes on loan and returns to shine.
Since the start of last season, Arsenal have become the best set-piece team in the league, with 25 goals — three more than anyone else. Declan Rice’s late goal against Manchester United came from a smart blocking scheme, the short corners at Goodison Park bamboozled Everton and provided the decisive goal, while their repeated crowding of Brighton’s front post on Saturday broke the deadlock.
When asked whether Jover is deserving of a Christmas tip, Arteta said: “Maybe, we can think about it.” If Arsenal’s prowess from dead ball situations clinches them the league, however, a blank cheque may be more fitting.
(Top photo: Robin Jones – AFC Bournemouth/AFC Bournemouth via Getty Images)
