On Saturday, Atlanta United host a Vancouver Whitecaps team that’s tall. It’s taller than Atlanta. Three inches taller on average. Vancouver was taller than Atlanta last year when it beat the Five Stripes 3-1 at home, courtesy of 2 corner kick goals. Six (38%) of Vancouver’s sixteen shots that day were headers (more than twice the long-run league average). And while that game was an outlier, generally this header/corner/set piece thing is a feature of Vancouver, not a bug. In 2017, a league high 25% of the giants’ shots came from corner situations or were assisted by free kicks.
Assessing the Vancouver Whitecaps and dead ball situations
