Exclusive: Former Liverpool Throw-In Coach Speaks on Set-Pieces | OneFootball

Across his five years as Liverpool’s throw-in coach, Thomas Grønnemark helped to usher in a new period of success at Anfield. After overseeing the Reds’ UEFA Champions League title in 2019, the Dane helped Liverpool secure their first league title in three decades in 2020. Now, he’s looking to do the same at Arsenal.

Now 50 years of age, Grønnemark has earned praise from countless coaching analysts like Glenn Crooks for his innovative tactical approaches. He is the first-ever throw-in coach, and he is blazing the trail for other coaches to test themselves in this quickly emerging field. EPL Index spoke to Grønnemark about a number of topics, including:

Good day Thomas, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. Can you tell us how you transitioned from football to athletics to bobsled to football again?

I’ll try to make it quite short, because I have a long story on my background. I fell in love with throw-ins when I was a small kid in the middle of the 80s, because my big cousins, Ben and Johnny, were really good at them. I also became a really good youth football player myself and played in the best U19 league in Denmark against good players like Thomas Gravesen, who later played for Celtic, Real Madrid, the Danish national team, and so on. But I wasn’t good enough to be a pro football player, so I went to athletics in the mid-90s, because I not only had a good long throw-in as a football player, but I was also super fast. I never lost a running duel, no matter if it was 10 meters or 50 meters, so I came straight onto the Danish national team. I think I had quite the talent for running fast. I was there in 6 years and learned a lot about not only sprinting, but also observed the throwers a lot and did a little throwing myself. Of course, it was just for fun, but I learned a lot about how the body worked. And then in 2002, I came on the Danish National Bobsled Team, and I was part of that in 4 years, from 2002 to 2006.

When did you realize that you could be a throw-in coach?

We had a cooperation with the German Bobsled Federation, and like you probably know, the Germans are well known for being really structured and going really deep down in analytics. Now, you can say that the football world had caught up, but at that time, the Germans were far ahead of all other countries, so as the Danish Bobsled Team, having this cooperation allowed us to become better. We also had access to a lot of knowledge that all other nations didn’t have. And then it was in the middle of that Bobsled period in 2004, we played an indoor football match against one of the German teams we trained with as a warm-up for the physical training that day. I took a long throw-in from one end of that indoor facility to the other. They were all impressed, and then they asked me, ‘How did you do that?’ I said that I was good at throw-ins when I was playing football myself, and then I got an idea: Maybe I can be a throw-in coach. So I said to my teammates, I want to be a throw-in coach. And then they said, ‘Can you be a throw-in coach? And then I said, I don’t know. 

Lastly you were ridiculed by a lot of pundits like Richard Keyes and Andy Gray for being the world’s first throw-in coach. Fast-forward a decade, do you feel like you’ve proven them wrong?

First of all, it didn’t affect me negatively in any way. Of course, when I heard that clip from Andy Gray and Richard Keyes on beIN Sports. I was a little bit in shock, but I think that was more about, if you ask me, the unprofessionalism around that. It was okay that they laughed, because people often laugh when they hear that I’m a throw-in coach. I use it also with humor in my talks, and so I could have come and spoke together with them at beIN, we could’ve had a laugh together, and I could’ve given them some information and knowledge, but it didn’t turn out that way. They chose just to make fun of it. But for me, it was not a problem. Actually, the times where people have been criticizing me without any real arguments about why throw-in coaching isn’t good, they’re just saying that it’s ridiculous or crazy…that’s actually been giving me a lot more followers, and more attention. And the other thing is that if you are innovative, if you are forward-thinking, you make new roads that no one else has gone on before.

If there’s no one who’s laughing at you, then you’re not really innovative. I’m not saying it’s a goal by itself to make people laugh at you, but I’m just saying that this is a natural thing when you’re doing totally new things. The most important thing for me is that there are some important people, not because I have to be praised by important people, but more to say that people who know a lot about football who are actually thinking either, ‘Okay, this is exciting, this is new, this can help us,’ or they’re just asking questions, because asking questions is also curiosity. So again, it’s fine that there are still some people who are often laughing about my job in social media. It’s no problem for me: I’ve been part of 15 titles in international football, I’ve won almost everything you can in club football. I’m living my life, I’m getting a decent payment, and sometimes I just think that people say, ‘Is there something called a throw-in coach? Then I sometimes think, ‘Okay, where have they been living the last five, seven years? But overall, it’s not a problem that people are laughing now.