A ball played in behind Conor Bradley for Kevin Schade to chase. Giorgi Mamardashvili leaves his goal and sidefoots into touch. The sense of expectation is palpable. Michael Kayode trots over from right-back to the opposite flank to take the throw-in. He dries the ball, measures his run, steps back and then in one languid fluid movement hurls the ball in to the near post. Liverpool clear. Two minutes later, it happens again. This time, Mamardashvili tries to play the ball to Bradley, who miscontrols to concede the throw-in. And this time, Kayode’s throw is flicked on by Kristoffer Ajer and volleyed home by Dango Ouattara. There are still only five minutes of Brentford’s game against Liverpool played. Welcome to the modern Premier League.
Only nine of the 241 goals scored in the Premier League going into this weekend have come from throw-ins, but it feels like far more. Forty-five have come from corners – 18.7%. Were that proportion to be maintained over the season it would present a remarkable leap on the high of 14.2% from 2010-11. The reality is there’s likely to be a regression to the mean: if a glance at the proportion of goals scored from corners shows anything, it’s that there really isn’t much of a pattern at all. The proportion hovered at 11 or 12% most years to 2009, since when it has been at 13-14% – a trend which, if anything, goes against the assumption that everybody stopped taking corners seriously in the peak years of guardiolismo only to rediscover their love of a booming inswinger last season (when, in fact, the proportion of goals from corners fell to its lowest level since 2013-14).
Yet something is clearly going on. To watch Arsenal’s win over Crystal Palace followed by Real Madrid’s victory against Barcelona last Sunday was to witness two extremely different interpretations of the sport (although even in Spain, just under 14% of goals this season have come from set plays). The suddenness of the change in the approach in England has been remarkable, all the more so for how evident it is among elite sides. It’s as though the past two decades of patient approach work, controlling the game through possession, have been swept away, an unfortunate phase English football went through and now regrets. It seems barely believable that the game allowed itself for a time to be convinced by the early data boffins that set plays weren’t really that important, that fans were misguided in their excitement at a corner.
It turns out that if teams weren’t regularly creating chances from set plays, they were just doing them wrong. But even if this is in effect English football growing out of its gap-year affectations, snuffing out the joss sticks and putting the beads and the kaftan back in the drawer, it’s still worth asking why it’s done so now, and what it may mean for the future.
To an extent this is an evolution of the influence of data. Corners are fixed points, much easier to analyse and control than the chaotic fluidity of open play. Runs, feints and blocking moves can be rehearsed in training and repeated to order in games. It may even be that set plays represent the most efficient way to break down a low block, which elite sides have increasingly found themselves facing as the financial inequalities within the game make it less and less feasible for the majority of opponents to take them on in open play.
But it’s also to do with circumstance. In January, Pep Guardiola acknowledged that Bournemouth, Brighton and Newcastle were at the cutting edge of the game. “Modern football,” he said, “is not positional, you have to ride the rhythm.” That was widely taken as meaning that runners were essential, an acceptance that his juego de posición had become predictable. But his broader point was that the packed modern calendar meant there was such a toll on players, so little time to recover, that the precise planning required for his preferred style had become impossible.
What is possible, though, is planning set pieces, something Mikel Arteta seems to have recognised before anybody else. Arsenal have scored seven goals from corners this season, more than anybody else in the Premier League; that represents 44% of their total, a higher proportion than anybody else.
Is this, then, the future? Is this what football is to be, a series of set plays – throw-ins or corners, the odd free-kick – interspersed with brief passages of action? One of the most obvious effects of early guardiolismo was the return of the diminutive technical midfielder. Barcelona may persist with Pedri and Fermín López, Liverpool are doing their best with Florian Wirtz and Alexis Mac Allister, but is the future of midfielders for them to be hulking figures, grafters and tacklers who may be able to get on the end of a corner?
Probably not. It’s more than 40 years since the notoriously athletic former West Germany international Hans-Peter Briegel was declared the footballer of the future, but the sport still accommodates a range of heights and shapes. Tactical styles come and go. Guardiolismo is in retreat in the face of the set-piece orthodoxy, but a new challenge will arise.
Football over its history has proved remarkably flexible and resilient; unlike, say, rugby union or hockey, it has very rarely needed law changes to resolve tactical issues.
The International Football Association Board, concerned by a fall in ball-in-play time as players prepare for long throws, is considering a 30-second limit on taking a throw (although if this is a decision based on entertainment, it’s arguable that Brentford fans derive more pleasure from the anticipation of Kayode than they would from a quickly taken throw that leads to the ball being lost) but the reality is that defenders will probably work out a way of clearing throws – which may even be as simple as picking centre-backs for how well they can mark and head rather than their range of passing – and the present trend will fade away.
Football exists in a state of constant evolution. After the possession-heavy years of guardiolismo, the game as an exercise of strategy and technique, this season has brought a reversion to something more physical. But this too will pass.
