I’ve been watching the sport for years now and it still baffles me why corners have a such low-return percentage for the attacking team. How is it that the ball almost always finds the head of a defending player?
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You have more defenders then attackers. This is because not only is one of the attacker taking the corner but the attackers needs to keep some players in defense to protect against counterattacks. Adding to this the defenders are mainly trying to get the ball away from the goal while attackers have to try to get it very accurately towards the goal. So it is much easier for a defender to scramble towards where the ball is going.
The keeper has a lot of help defending the goal. Defenders on both posts reduce the area the keeper needs to cover. Every attacker should be covered by a defender of similar height, standing between the attacker and the goal. The corner kick taker should be covered as well. And all the defenders need to do is clear the ball, where as the attackers have to get the ball past the keeper and multiple defenders.
It is often a numbers game there will normally be 9 defenders plus a goalkeeper protecting the goal and maybe 6 players attacking the goal.
Statistically about 1 in 10 corners leads to a goal. So there’s an advantage to the attacking team, but not so much.
One important thing is that the ball is not just thrown in there randomly, there is always a few potential targets they aim at. It depends on the strategy, but usually the defending team have a shitload of people covering the player(s) who has the most capability to score a head goal. That in itself is a very trained skill, it’s not easy to get the timing and the head movement to direct the ball correctly – don’t forget that the ball also spins on the way there. And not to mention the physical advantage. Ofc, taller players score most of the head goals (at least from corners).
And also, the attacking team generally won’t have that many people there because there’s this thing called counterattacks. If the attacking team loses possession while having a lot of people attacking, they’ll have to run **behind** the opponent’s attackers, what makes reganing the possession a lot harder. So they’d eventually reach your goal with a numerical advantage (with your defenders behind them)
>How is it that the ball almost always finds the head of a defending player?
You’re right that only around 1 in 20-25 corners results in a goal, but it’s not because defenders almost always head the ball out. The defending team has the big advantage that they have a goalkeeper who can use his hands, and the keeper catches or punches away a decent percentage of corners. Then the attacking team is able to make contact with a reasonably high percentage of corners, but many of them miss the goal and go out of bounds, end up blocked by a defender, are saved by the keeper, or skip away harmlessly.
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