Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal are poised to claim their first Premier League title in 22 years – but their brutally efficient mode of play, and the emphasis they have placed on scoring goals from set pieces, has sparked one of the biggest stylistic debates in modern football.
According to the latest statistics from Opta Analyst, more set-piece goals (0.73 per game) have been scored this season than in any other since 2013-14, and more than a quarter of goals have come from non-penalty set pieces, a greater proportion than any other campaign. Arsenal lead the way with 21 of their 67 goals scored this way. Corner kicks have yielded 17.5 per cent of all goals in the Premier League – and few do them better than the trend-setting Gunners, who more than make up for their occasional lack of fluidity in this department.
All top teams now have dedicated set piece coaches, and they rehearse corner routines with precision, pushing the boundaries as players jostle in the penalty area, deliberately crowding the opposition goalkeeper. Some teams even have throw-in coaches, underpinning the resurgence of the long throw-in as an attacking weapon on par with a well-positioned free kick. Tony Pulis’ Stoke City were once mocked for this, relentlessly; now everyone is doing it, with a huge explosion in goals scored from throw-ins over the past two Premier League seasons.
To say it’s been divisive is an understatement.
Liverpool boss Arne Slot spoke for many fans when he said a couple of months ago that the Premier League was no longer a “joy to watch”, and the prevalence of set pieces is something his “football heart doesn’t like”.
Pep Guardiola has compared it to the rise of the three-point shot in the NBA, describing it as something teams must adapt to rather than complain about; his Manchester City side, though, is one of England’s least-reliant teams on set pieces.
“John the Pragmatist is killing it at the moment,” said Ange Postecoglou on SEN radio earlier this year, deploying his famous shorthand for the sort of strategic caution he has always resisted.
Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and long-suffering Arsenal fans won’t care what it looks like; to them, the naysayers are just unhappy that they’re on top. But there’s no escaping that their structured method of attack doesn’t tug on the heartstrings of neutrals in the same way as some of the champion teams of the recent past.
Darren Burgess comes at this debate from a unique perspective. Best known in Australia as a high-performance alchemist in the AFL with Port Adelaide, Melbourne and Adelaide, his true love is football – and his experiences working with the Socceroos, Liverpool, Arsenal and now Juventus, where he was appointed director of performance in September, have cemented him as one of the most respected voices in his sector of the industry, and an expert on how tactics intersect with fitness, conditioning and science.
What Burgess sees in the set-piece revolution in England is a reflection of something deeper: how football is being increasingly shaped by a desire for control, and not necessarily for the better.
Compared to a decade ago when he was at Liverpool, the data available to clubs these days has increased dramatically in both volume and granularity. There is nothing they don’t know about their players’ fitness levels, but it’s much deeper; Burgess could tell you the xG (expected goals) value of any movement in any part of the pitch, by any one of the 22 players on it.
This sort of information has transformed the way clubs prepare, extended careers, and enabled clubs to manage players optimally to avoid injury – but it has also led to a prevalence of regimented, orchestrated play at the expense of artistry and flair.
Spontaneity, the critics argue, has been managed out of football.
“I think some people in my profession have gone too far down that path, for sure,” Burgess told this masthead.
Had Burgess remained in Australia – and in particularly within the AFL system, where physical data is gospel – he might have gone down that path, too. But his spell at Liverpool opened his eyes.
At the time, the club had a glut of creative stars – Fernando Torres, Luis Suárez and Maxi Rodriguez, to name a few – who hardly went to the gym, and wouldn’t even know how to spell GPS, but knew how to get up for games because they knew their own bodies.
“I just saw a completely different way of doing things – and I just thought, no, we had obsessed in Australia and England over numbers and numbers and numbers … I realised there was a better way,” he said.
His experience at Arsenal with another Spaniard, left-back Nacho Monreal, was formative. Monreal had suffered from a calf injury two weeks before a crucial match away to Manchester United, and it was Burgess’ job to get him back in time.
“The way you rehab a calf injury or an injury is to slowly progress the speed, power and the exposure,” he said.
“So I came to him with this plan: ‘This is what we’re going to do to try and get back for Manchester United, if you can do all of this by the Friday before we travel to Old Trafford on Saturday, you can play’.
“He said, ‘Darren, tranquilo, tranquilo. I’ll train on the Friday before Old Trafford, and then I’ll play.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, you have to do this,’ and he said, ‘Darren, trust me, I’ll be fine’.
“His feet did not touch the grass until the Friday before we played Manchester United – and then he didn’t miss a beat. He had one training session, and that made me think, ‘Hang on, it’s not about the numbers, it’s about the player, the feel of it, what the athlete believes in’.”
The reality is, though, that the era of the pudgy No.10 pulling the strings is over. To play at the highest level, there is a baseline expectation of athleticism, and there are no exceptions – especially given the high volume of matches players are being asked to play, which Burgess argues has influenced the way those teams operate.
Burgess is also affiliated with FIFPro, the global players’ union, which has mounted legal action against FIFA and top European leagues over the increasingly packed global calendar.
Take Arsenal as an example: they have played 59 games this season, and it’s not over. When it is, many of their stars will play at least another three, and probably more, at the upcoming World Cup. And they’ll only get a few weeks off before they’re asked to do it all again.
Burgess believes there is a direct link between the prevalence of set-pieces and the number of matches that teams are being asked to play: each one is a chance for players to take a breather, and so they have become more prized than ever.
“We ought to be really careful of that, and FIFA need to be really aware of that, because in the last couple of European Championships – even the recent AFCON, World Cups – the quality of play has probably been objectively reduced, and I think that’s due to fatigue,” he said.
“And so a flow-on effect of that fatigue might be that the set plays become way more important and way more deliberate, and you take a lot more time setting them up.”
Burgess reckons what is happening in the Premier League is a moment that will pass – as soon as someone figures out the answer.
Everything in football is cyclical – tactics included, as they are usually a direct response to what came before. Dominant ideas eventually create the conditions for their own disruption.
“I feel like some teams, and maybe football as a whole, could do with taking a step away a little bit from the data side of things and just embrace the chaos, which is what I love about football,” he said.
“I firmly believe that teams that can balance the two in future will be successful. You can make arguments about, say, the current day Arsenal, who are on track to win the league with a very deliberate model of play – and we can argue whether there’s creativity in that or not.
“What I do know is that when teams come up with the solution to what they’re doing, they will have to come up with another way of playing. The pathway to that is to combine the physical, the analytics, with that creative element, which will always be the difference in games.
“At the moment, we’re probably at a tipping point, and the creative players will be the ones who will be able to unlock that data-driven way of playing. It’s certainly my hope.”
