"Football is very up and down, right? One minute you are winning the Premier League and the next you are looking for a new role somewhere."

It is a brutal reality Aaron Briggs learned firsthand when Liverpool parted company with him two days before the turn of the year. As he reflects on it now, the 39-year-old is sanguine about a profession where season's greetings are in short supply when you are the set-piece coach of a team conceding goals at set pieces.

Two Decades in the Making

Briggs spent 20 years building his career, securing a place on the coaching staff of a European giant. His grounding as a student came at Blackpool, where he worked for free, filming matches with an umbrella tilted to block out the rain. Preston North End hired him full-time in 2008, and three years later he moved to Manchester City, where he spent seven years working his way up the ladder at the academy before spending two seasons (2018-19 and 2019-20) as a match analyst with Pep Guardiola's first team.

In 2020, he joined Monaco, initially as an analyst before moving up to a coaching role and eventually becoming the club's head of methodology. In 2022, he joined Wolfsburg, where he spent two seasons as assistant manager to Niko Kovac. The trajectory was clear.

In June 2024, he received a call inviting him to a FaceTime call with Liverpool manager Arne Slot. After that conversation, he was added to the first-team staff at Melwood as individual development coach. Despite Liverpool advertising for a set-piece coach in May, by the time Briggs arrived in Philadelphia for the U.S. pre-season tour he had agreed to take on that responsibility too.

"As an assistant, you try to help where you can, so I thought 'Why not?'" says Briggs. "I knew how much goes into it, as I had seen Nico Jover work at Manchester City day to day. You watch hours of the opposition, every single restart and set piece of your own team, the other team, then you're watching others for ideas. Analysts are doing unbelievable hours every week. You have to be so passionate about it, otherwise you can't do it. I knew it was going to consume my life, which it did."

The Glory Season

The first year went swimmingly. Liverpool won the Premier League by a country mile and, while in the middle of the pack for set pieces, they did not concede a single set-piece goal until the second half of the season. On the day they beat Tottenham Hotspur 5-1 to secure the title, Slot urged him onto the pitch to take in the applause with the rest of the team. He got a tap on the shoulder from Micky van de Ven, a player he had helped Kovac develop from a left-back into a centre-back at Wolfsburg.

"He gave me his shirt and said 'Thanks for everything'. It meant a lot to me because of that respect and relationship we had."

With a winner's medal around his neck, Briggs was full of optimism. Even more so when Liverpool asked him to move into the set-piece role on a full-time basis ahead of the next season.

Things Go South

But things went south in the second season. Liverpool conceded 12 set-piece goals in the Premier League, scoring only three. Slot publicly bemoaned the record at times after games. In November, Slot labelled it "close to ridiculous". In December, after conceding a 96th-minute equaliser against Leeds United, he said he was "so annoyed" by the situation.

"I had experience of being in the spotlight at Wolfsburg and Monaco as an assistant coach but the thing with set pieces is that it's very, very measurable. It's black and white," says Briggs. "That summer, I took on the role full-time and thought I could make a difference. I put my heart and soul into it, as many hours as humanely possible."

"The club tried to help so it wasn't just me on my own. The analyst team were really helpful. We didn't just watch it go downhill. We had meetings and spoke with the players, the coaches. I was doing more research, looking at all the chances we conceded and how they happened. Am I putting the wrong players in the wrong places? Is it the setup that is wrong? But it was mostly second and third balls so it wasn't the setup at delivery."

"We spoke to key players and Virgil (van Dijk) was one I spoke to heavily. He was getting frustrated. I was, the club were, the fans were. We tried to help each other. We tried everything to correct it."

It was difficult to find a solution. The majority of the goals conceded were not coming from the first contact, but the phases that followed. Slot suggested an element of bad luck when comparing their numbers to expected goals totals. Liverpool went from the middle of the pack to becoming one of the weakest set-piece teams in both attack and defence. What made it more dumbfounding was that their Champions League record of five goals scored and zero conceded was the seventh-best in the entire competition.

"I wish I could tell you why. The Champions League record almost annoyed me in the end."

In the title-winning season, Briggs helped design a corner routine that helped Mohamed Salah score against Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium after several blockers cleared the path for the ball to be cut back to him. It worked exactly as planned the day before. After the poor start to last season, in November he thought things may have been turning around when Virgil van Dijk scored a header at the same end of the Etihad to equalise against City, but Andy Robertson was controversially ruled offside while interfering with goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma. City then scored in first-half stoppage time from a 30-yard deflection, which counted as a corner conceded as they had taken it short.

"That was a low point. It was a very grey offside and you think to yourself, 'If it goes the other way maybe that would have changed our season, maybe the corners would have snowballed'. But the margins are so small at this level."

No Regrets

"It hurt when we weren't performing as I was putting everything into and it wasn't going great. In hindsight, it didn't work out for the club or myself, but no regrets."

"I was very fortunate to be part of a team that won the Premier League and go on an open-top bus parade in Liverpool with hundreds of thousands of fans. I wish from the bottom of my heart it had gone better in that second year but everyone was trying so I didn't feel alone."

"There wasn't a falling-out. Arne was really supportive and I spoke to him a few weeks ago. It was very amicable. The numbers were the numbers unfortunately and that's part of football."

Former head of performance at Manchester City, Grant Downie, has been a mentor throughout for Briggs and his level-headedness was a source of comfort during the tough moments. It was the most public-facing role Briggs has occupied given the high-profile nature of set-piece coaches, heightened by Jover's fame at Arsenal.

"He has massively developed himself," Briggs says of Jover. "His attention to detail on every aspect of every set piece, the timing, the movements. A set piece is over quite quickly but what happens before, during and after that ball is delivered is really key. The way he broke it up was quite something."

"I'm not surprised he's done what he has done as he put in all the hours in the world to create it. He's always thinking and evolving. Even in the last two seasons they are doing things slightly differently."

Learning From the Best

As a Mancunian, Briggs' move to City in 2011 coincided with the club's emergence as a superpower. In the academy, he got to work with a stellar cast of future stars, including Brahim Diaz, Phil Foden, Jadon Sancho and Jeremie Frimpong. By 2018, he had risen to become the head of the under-23 analysis department and was on the grass for every training session.

Then came the phone call that changed his life.

"I was setting up a session when I got a phone call from HR. I thought 'Oh no,' laughs Briggs. "It was the opposite. A vacancy had come up for head of analysis in the first team. They phoned again to say I needed to go over this afternoon and meet Mikel Arteta."

"We spent an hour in his office, talking everything about football. Analysis, processes, basically seeing if I was the right fit for them. He got onto speaking really in-depth about the centre-backs and playing a high line. Body positioning, triggers when the opposition receive the ball, knees bent, when they should start running back, going into all this granular detail about this one player who is 40 yards away from the ball. That was the detail he wanted."

"I remember walking out of that room like, 'Wow, this is a different level.'"

He was not finished there. He entered a through door that connects to the head coach's office. Round two. This time, Arteta and Guardiola talking football for another half an hour.

"I thought I knew about football. I knew nothing. It was like going back to school."

Briggs received a call at the end of the day to inform him that he had been hired and his work started immediately. Arteta wanted him to work closely alongside him on individual development.

"He is high support, high demand. He is right to the point and quite cutting but the way the academy worked, it was multi-disciplinary, so I saw how it all connected and that's what he liked."

"Mikel was learning anything he could. He was like a sponge. You knew he was going to be a head coach one day. It was quite obvious. His enthusiasm and passion was every day. There wasn't a day off. He was always walking around with an intention. That drove the standards of the departments."

Briggs had a front-row seat to two of the most influential coaches of their era but the thing that stood out most about Guardiola was his work ethic.

"We produced very in-depth, detailed video and written reports on the opponents. Every single phase, the exact way he wanted it built, telestrations (annotated video replays). We had two full-time staff to create it. Yet, he would still go away and watch three or four games of the opponent."

"I used to think, 'Why?' I figured it out after I saw how good he was at half-time. He has played out so many scenarios before the game that he had already sparked thoughts about how he would change it. It was a process he had to go through so at half-time he could go: 'Bang'. He had seen it all play out in his brain. I don't know if he ever wrote them down but some of the stuff he would come up with at half-time was incredible."

From Monaco to the World

Briggs moved to Monaco in 2020 when Laurence Stewart, now technical director at Chelsea, hired him as an analyst-coach to link video and training closer together. It is a common role now but it was in its infancy then. It meant he was working with players on specifics of their own game, which he carried into Wolfsburg, where he helped Maxence Lacroix.

"He was always very driven to play at the top so it hasn't surprised me he is at Chelsea and in the French national team. He has always had a very steely calmness: 'I am going to do this, I am going to get better and get there'."

"I had a conversation with him the other day and he is still wanting to improve. He doesn't think he's made it. Can he improve pre-game routine, diet? He is looking at all of these things."

At Liverpool, Briggs oversaw individual development. He worked regularly with the likes of Rio Ngumoha, who were often outside matchday squads but required a bespoke programme to keep them sharp. He also re-integrated players returning from injury.

"The coaches split the players up. Arne had the captain's group and we had six or seven players each. Each player would have a contact point every two or three weeks. Either analysis, extra work on the pitch or unit/individual work after training."

"(Ibrahima) Konate was one of my players and he was very responsive to individual development. They all are nowadays, as it is about them and they all want to improve but everyone has different learning styles. Some top players love the analysis, like Vincent Kompany at City, but others have to do it on the pitch. It is about learning how they understand it as not everyone is good in a classroom."

What's Next

After leaving Liverpool, Briggs returned to a role at UEFA's game insights department, attending all four UEFA finals inside 12 days and working with managers including Ange Postecoglou, Erik ten Hag, Edin Terzic, Sean Dyche and Rui Faria to create coach education material.

"Ange is a very interesting character. He wants to think outside the box. He said, 'Watch my next team, I am going to do something different again'. He was already thinking about it. Terzic was very into technology, AI and how he measures his game model."

"What I learned is that they stick to their point of difference. That is what they are good at, so they go with it. That is a message to coaches. You can't be a carbon copy. You need to stand out and offer something elite either way."

Briggs has had some conversations about joining the backroom staff of clubs since but he is looking for the right opportunity, whether it be as an individual coach, assistant coach or a technical role.

"I have done a lot of self-reflection on what I have done in my career so far, what has worked, what I could have done better. I've created some documents on individual development, game models, staffing structures, roles and responsibilities in backroom staff and what is effective."

Determined not to be defined by a testing final six months at Anfield, Briggs is keen to put the lessons of the last two decades into practice at his next club.