Set-piece goals are up across the board in the Premier League. Plenty of people are moaning about this latest trend. But could it actually be a positive for the league?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that set-pieces are playing a prominent role in the Premier League this season.
Arsenal, the league’s runaway leaders, are one of the best teams at using set-pieces in the competition’s history, and the evidence of the season so far is that they will storm towards the title while relying fairly heavily on dead-ball situations.
They’ve been doing it for a few years, and whether or not Arsenal are the sole reason for numbers being up across the board, they appear to have at least played a part in inspiring everyone else to follow suit. The numbers this season are stark.
The current campaign is producing the second-highest proportion of goals from set-pieces (30.0%) of any season in Premier League history, just behind 31.0% in 2009-10. That’s despite none of the last 14 seasons seeing more than 26% of goals come from set-pieces. Last season, 2024-25, the rate of set-piece goals was down at 22.0%.
Looking specifically at corners, the rise has been even more apparent. This season, 19% of all goals have come from corners (45/241), the highest proportion ever in a Premier League campaign. Meanwhile, most Premier League teams are taking every chance to launch long throws into the box, a tactic that has barely been used, particularly by the best teams, since the 1990s. There have been 4.0 long throws (measuring 20m or more) into the penalty area per game this season, which is more than double that of any other season on record (since 2014-15).
The jump in set-piece focus this season has been a huge surprise. Yes, Arsenal were already working hard to maximise their set-plays, but it was Liverpool who won the title last season with set-pieces much more of an afterthought. Arsenal were good but were they, alone, enough to inspire the whole Premier League to sit up and take notice?
They probably didn’t, but what they and teams like Brentford – who have long placed a great deal of emphasis on making the most of dead balls – have done is highlight how set-pieces can be a useful weapon in levelling the playing field. In those moments when the ball has gone out of play and almost all of the 22 players on the pitch are piled into a single penalty area, the gulfs in financial clout that define Premier League football these days are far less pronounced. It’s much, much easier for a team like Brentford to be better than Manchester City at set-piece situations than it is for them to outplay them when the ball never goes out of play.
Maybe, then, this season’s development makes sense. Everyone, not least the three promoted teams, is using set-pieces to gain an advantage that they might have previously been able to make do without. And a more competitive Premier League, where Bournemouth and Sunderland are in the top four, is surely only a good thing, right?
Whatever the explanation, there’s certainly an argument that the rise in set-piece usage is a positive for the Premier League. Many of English football’s traditionalists are loving it, saying it serves as proof that Sam Allardyce, Tony Pulis and co. were right all along.
But there is also a growing backlash to the movement. Many Premier League fans, now accustomed to watching relentlessly fast-paced and high-quality football every week, find the use of set-pieces tiresome and dull.
That’s because so much effort, resource and thought goes into planning for set-pieces these days that lots of teams take their time over getting the ball back into play. If you employ a set-piece coach and spend hours on the training ground practising them, then there’s no point in rushing them. Doing so might risk putting in a poor-quality cross when nobody is ready or organised, and wasting your opportunity.
The result, however, is less actual football than in any other season in recent memory. The ball has been in play for a lower percentage of overall match time (54.8%) than in any other Premier League season on record (since 2015-16).
premier league ball-in-play time
It’s true that games are longer these days because more stoppage time is being added on at the end of matches in an attempt to combat time-wasting, but fans are still watching less actual football than in almost any other recent season.
There has been an average of 55 minutes and 15 seconds of time when the ball is in play in Premier League games this season. That’s one minute and 44 seconds less game time than last season. It’s almost three minutes fewer than the season before. Only two of the 10 seasons before this one have seen less total ball-in-play time, and they were the two early seasons of VAR, when refereeing delays were incredibly long.
While VAR has undoubtedly contributed this season, too, delays at set-pieces are also a big factor. Effort is constantly being made to reduce the length of VAR delays, and they are shorter than in those early seasons after its introduction.
The ball isn’t going out of play more than usual (94.9 stoppages per game is lower than the average over the past decade), and yet more time is spent waiting for the ball to come back into play than in any season over that period.
On average, 45 minutes and 31 seconds of every Premier League game this season is spent waiting for the ball to come back into play. It’s the first time on record (since 2015-16) that number has ever gone over 45 minutes, and is nearly two minutes more than any other season. It’s also an increase of three minutes on last season.
Across the board, the length of breaks in play are up. The average length of each stoppage is 28.8 seconds, the longest on record. Corners, at 36.3 seconds, are taking longer to be put back into play than in any other season, and throw-ins, at 17.9 seconds, are also at their slowest. Those two types of stoppage, as well as goal-kicks, are where the increase in delays this season is most apparent.
For example, each throw-in this season is taking, on average, 1.76 seconds longer than it was last season. There have also been more throw-ins this season (38.1 per game) than there were last season (32.9 per game). That all means that this season, a whopping 11 minutes, 21 seconds has been spent waiting for throw-ins to be put back into play in each Premier League game, compared to eight minutes, 50 seconds last season. That’s an increase of more than two-and-a-half minutes in each game that fans are simply watching players prepare to take a throw-in.
throw-in delay by season
Over the course of a full 380-game Premier League season, that’s 16 hours more time waiting just for throw-ins to be taken. Is this really what Premier League fans should be spending good money to watch?
As we’ve mentioned, VAR delays are also a contributing factor to the longer delays, but the fact is teams are taking longer over attacking set-pieces than in previous years on top of VAR stoppages. Add into the mix that goals are being scored at the second-lowest rate (2.7 per game) in any Premier League season since 2009 (after 2.6 per game in 2014-15), and you have decidedly less entertainment than many would say should come as a minimum from the league roundly branded the ‘greatest on the planet’. And beyond mere opinion, according to the Opta Power Rankings, the Premier League is the strongest league in the world, and by some distance.
So, are complaints over a league-wide increase in reliance on set-pieces justifiable?
The truth is that coaches and teams can’t really win. Arsenal have been far and away the best team in the Premier League this season. They might break Chelsea’s incredible record of 15 goals conceded in a top-flight campaign. They are four points clear at the top and look pretty much unbeatable.
And yet they face criticism for relying heavily on set-pieces. They have scored 11 of 16 goals from set-plays (including penalties), or 69%, the highest proportion of any team in a single Premier League season. They have already scored seven goals from corners and will surely challenge the record of 16 for a full season.
But what exactly is the criticism here? That Arsenal are capable of better so they should win ‘better’? Here we were thinking the aim of football was to win.
Arsenal are simply making the most of an incredible and unprecedented strength of theirs. Any other team would love to have anything like Arsenal’s set-piece prowess. Perhaps it’s just annoyance from other fans that their team isn’t making it look as easy as Arsenal do.
Elsewhere, fans are complaining about their team slowing games down by sending a player across the pitch to take a long throw-in, rather than taking it short more quickly. Goals from long throw-ins are rare, so fans find it easy to complain about them when so many lead to nothing.
Across north London, for example, lots of Spurs fans are taking issue with manager Thomas Frank’s use of centre-back Kevin Danso as a long-throw specialist when it takes so long for him to take them and given none of his launches have led to a goal.
It’s worth remembering, though, that a complaint aimed at Frank’s predecessor, Ange Postecoglou, was how little he cared about set-pieces, and also how relentless his football was. Spurs would constantly get the ball back into play extremely quickly under Postecoglou, and it was surely no coincidence that their players suffered a huge number of injuries under him.
tottenham throw-ins 2024-25
tottenham throw-ins 2025-26
Spurs have admittedly been a tough watch this season, struggling to create in open play with any kind of consistency, but they are third in the table with the second best defence in the Premier League. Should Frank really be doing anything differently? Would Spurs really be better off overall if they took their throw-ins short?
Arsenal and Tottenham are far from the only teams leaning on set-pieces or being criticised for doing so, but their experiences are a useful barometer of where fan feeling is with regards to the prominence of dead balls this season.
Something else that is worth discussing is how difficult it is to waste time these days. Smaller teams have always needed to waste time to beat bigger teams, but that has become much tougher to do in the era of extra stoppage time being added on at the end of games.
Set-pieces now provide an opportunity to eat up some valuable seconds without retribution; despite the longer delays this season, there hasn’t been a proportional increase in added-on time. Stoppages have gone up by nearly three minutes compared to last season, but on average only 46 more seconds is being added on by the fourth official at the ends of the two halves.
And if a competitive Premier League is the goal, where anyone really can beat anyone, then teams should not be punished for taking their time over set-pieces.
Premier League football is a bit different this season. Whether that’s for the best or not, it’s time to get used to it.
Premier League Stats Opta
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