Three things Mohun Bagan must improve to fight their way to winning 2025-26 ISL title

Mohun Bagan SG leads the race for the ISL title

Mohun Bagan regained control of the 2025-26 Indian Super League (ISL) championship race with their gritty 1-0 win over NorthEast United recently. The Mariners have a two-point lead over second-place Mumbai City FC, with four more matches remaining until the end of the campaign.

Even though the Kolkata giants might be favorites to win the title once again, it won’t be easy sailings for them at all. The Mariners have some tricky fixtures in front of them, including those against title rivals FC Goa and East Bengal! Sergio Lobera keeps insisting that there is still room for improvement in his side, even after seeing them win the majority of their matches in style in the 2025-26 ISL.

With the league campaign coming to a thrilling close, it’s clear that Mohun Bagan will need to win their remaining matches to retain the championship. To do so, there are a few aspects that they need to improve upon to go all the way, which we look at going forward.

3. Set-piece threat

Even though Mohun Bagan have scored 19 goals in the ISL after nine matches, the second-most for any team in this campaign, there hasn’t been as much diversity to their goal-scoring prowess as Sergio Lobera would probably like. The Spaniard is an advocate of a slick attacking football system, where he prefers his side to dominate possession and play slick passing moves to create goals.

However, Mohun Bagan’s threat on set-pieces has withered out considerably since the end of the 2024-25 ISL campaign. The only notable set-piece goal scored by them in this ISL season was in the first match when Tom Aldred scored in the late stages. Mohun Bagan were unable to score despite getting a plethora of corners against the likes of Bengaluru FC, Mumbai City and Jamshedpur FC. With the Mariners having a lengthy gap until their next game against FC Goa (on 8 May), Lobera must work with his set-piece coach on improving their threat from corners and free-kicks.

The Spanish boss has to put more emphasis on adding unpredictability to Mohun Bagan’s set-pieces, ensuring that more players can actually get at the end of corners & free kicks to score goals. Once Mohun Bagan can score more freely from set piece scenarios, it’ll automatically increase their goal threat and help them score more freely.

2. Defending through the wide areas

It’s not like East Bengal have been defensively poor in the 2025-26 ISL, they’ve only conceded six goals from nine games, but there have been occasions where they’ve looked quite vulnerable. In the matches against Punjab FC and even Mumbai City, the Mariners were outwitted on multiple occasions and a lot of their defensive problems seem to be stemming through the wide areas.

It’s not like Mohun Bagan’s full-backs have been poor, with both Abhishek Singh and Subhasish Bose being quite proactive in fulfilling their responsibilities, but they’ve been quite overwhelmed at times. Lobera probably needs to tweak his system a little bit to ensure that his full-backs get more protection, which would allow them to defend better and take more risks in committing to challenges in order to regain possession.

As a whole unit, Mohun Bagan have to be more proactive to defend through the wide areas to neutralize the threat of opposition wingers and stop them from creating chances easily. If able to do so, they’d probably grab more clean sheets and that will automatically raise their chances of winning matches.

1. Being more clinical on counter-attacks

Mohun Bagan might be the most dominant team in the ISL in terms of dominating possession, averaging 64.9% possession per game so far, but that might be impacting their ruthlessness on the counter-attacks.

As they hoard most of the control of the ball in games, Mohun Bagan’s priority is to look into quick build-up play to outwit their opponents and score goals. However, they also need to start being way more prolific on the counter-attacks to increase the element of surprise in their goal-scoring threat. Sergio Lobera needs his players to be way more proactive after regaining possession, using quick thinking to expertly move the ball into the final third and pouncing on opposition players being out of possession.

The Mariners need their wingers to be rapid in moving the ball forward quickly on the transitions, and also for the forwards to get in the right places to score goals in a more efficient fashion. Doing so will help them add even more diversity to their goal-scoring threat and catch out teams by surprise in the final stretch of the campaign.

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