It was in the autumn of 2017 when goal kicks were first seen as a legitimate attacking tool.
After signing for Benfica, it quickly became clear that Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson’s left leg was more of a trebuchet than a human limb, capable of smashing the ball 80 yards over the opposition’s defense to score goals.
The trick confused the teams because it was something that had not been seen before. City’s entire front three would position themselves twenty yards beyond the opponent’s backline, safe in the knowledge that they could not be offside from a goal kick.
This City goal kick setup is great. Players are spread out everywhere, the opponent has no idea whether the pass goes short, into the big hole in the middle or straight up. Ederson really changed the game. pic.twitter.com/hhzQBJuJP1
— Sam Lee (@SamLee) April 28, 2019
There are on average 16 goal kicks in a Premier League match, making this scenario the third most common set piece after throw-ins and free kicks.
Until 2017, however, presumably because they start as far away from the opponent’s net as possible geographically, goal kicks were largely taken out of hand and seen without much thought as nothing more than a requirement to restart play. rather than a fixed piece that can be mapped and used against your opponent.
On most occasions, teams would push everyone up and the goalkeeper would hit the ball as far as he could, an act in English football that was widely accompanied by fans behind his goal shouting: “Oooooooooooh…! You rest! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!” – originally as an attempt to distract the goalkeeper involved, later as a form of pantomime to amuse oneself.
Decade after decade, goal kicks were invariably taken long and with little strategic thought (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty)
Then, in the summer of 2019, IFAB – the body responsible for the Laws of the Game – changed the rules around goal kicks by stating that the ball no longer had to leave the penalty area of the team that took the ball before a player could make the first pass to get. .
Football has tinkered with the offside rule and VAR has transformed the spectacle, especially for those attending matches, but the change to the goal kick rule is the most radical change to the style of the sport since the law banned goalkeepers from picking up returns , had been introduced in the early 1990s.
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There were some immediate, if expected, changes in behavior now that the first pass could be freely controlled from anywhere within the penalty area. The number of short-played goal kicks in the Premier League has risen steadily and is now more than double the number in 2018/19, when around three-quarters of them were knocked down on the pitch.
An additional area of 44 yards by 18 yards in which the ball may be received is not permitted corpses transformative, but over the past five years it has played a major role in hastening the rise of man-to-man marking, the hollowing out of central midfield and the tactics of playing the opposition’s press.
These are three of the themes that emerged from UEFA’s technical observer’s tactical assessment of this summer’s European Championship, epitomized by Slovakia drawing England into the full press and almost scoring through direct play to the striker, and The Netherlands caused an overload in the middle of the match. pitch against highly ranked Austria.
Slovakia almost scores from a goal kick against England
The Dutch create a four-on-two in midfield and counter-attack against Austria
That’s why the scenarios below – a group of players around the penalty area of the team taking the goal kick, another just inside the opponent’s half and a sea of nothing in between – have become a common sight across all top leagues.
Tactical camera view of Brighton versus Chelsea
Tactical camera view of Fulham versus Brighton
Man City versus Luton in the FA Cup last season, with Ederson’s long kicking skills playing a crucial role in several goals
‘The impact of the rule change was underestimated by many,” Arsène Wenger, the former Arsenal manager and now head of global development at FIFA, world football’s governing body, said in a review of the rule last year.
“It was introduced to make the game faster and more spectacular, but even more has changed. The main attraction is to pull your opponent as far away from the goal as possible and try to continue playing. If you can play through the first pressure, you have a whole half of the field to be dangerous. That has been at stake from the start.”
But how can a trend like this spread in such a short time? And how has it become as normal to see a central defender passing the ball to the goalkeeper as the other way around?
It’s something Arsenal do regularly, with defender Gabriel playing against goalkeeper David Raya before the latter kicks long towards Kai Havertz and the midfield cavalry racing forward on supporting runs.
“What happened initially after the rule change was that it became easier to build up because you didn’t have to play this long pass across the box, which gave the pressing team the opportunity to get there early” , someone says first. team coach/analyst at a major European club, quoted here anonymously because they were not allowed to speak.
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“Back then, if the goalkeeper played against a central defender, you would have confined yourself to one side of the pitch, while now, if the defender plays against the goalkeeper, you are right in the middle.
“Most teams now bring midfielders into the penalty area and that only increases the space to defend. It’s so hard to be compact because if you want to press up top, the midfielders have to adjust with the midfielders, which naturally creates space behind them.
“The question you ask the opposition is: ‘Are you so keen to put pressure on us that you will stand at the back three against three or four against four?’ Teams realized they had to use more bodies to last long, which explains the rise of man-to-man pressing.”
(Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
However, every action brings a reaction, and that’s what happened: teams realized they could create false transition moments by isolating their attackers.
“The attacking team’s response was: ‘If you release six or seven players in the last quarter of the field, we will get a goalkeeper who can put him over the defense,’” said the same coach. says analyst. “There is now no space between the lines to be static and turn on the ball. The concept has changed and is about leaving the big spaces where you want to be free and then getting there at the right time so you can run and your marker has to react to it.
One of the most effective teams in the first few seasons after the rule change was Italy’s Inter Milan, led by Antonio Conte. As a coach whose preferred style of football is based on rehearsed patterns of play, Conte took advantage by manipulating the opponent’s formation to give his attackers space to run into.
More recently, the German national team have been creative in their use of goal kicks, and during their friendlies in March this year they showed us how many different layers are involved in thinking.
In this example against the Netherlands, goalkeeper Manuel Neuer comes forward with the ball, while his midfielders move out from the center to drag their markers wide and open a central passing channel to Havertz. Neuer’s ball is the trigger for the supporting cast to unite around him, with Havertz’s dismissal creating a four-on-four chance.
The new rule gave coaches a blank canvas to work with, and has provided many variations in how they can gain an advantage in build-up.
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Southampton manager Russell Martin has been one of the head coaches who has tried to rethink the format.
One central defender lines up with the goalkeeper, receives and then waits for the opponent’s attacker to press him before playing a back ball to the goalkeeper, who had moved 10 yards forward so he could be used as a reserve man, just as another central defender.
The new head coach of leading French club Marseille, Roberto De Zerbi, was bold in subscribing to almost exclusively short goal kicks in his previous job at Brighton & Hove Albion of the Premier League, but he was even more experimental in the two clubs before that at Sassuolo in Italy and The Ukrainian Shaktar Donetsk.
In his debut 2020/21 season with the latter, he regularly had his team playing with four players in the penalty area, drawing the press in before finding the reserve man after they had drawn the opponents to one side.
Last season, Hamburg-based St. Pauli, whose manager Fabian Hurzeler has succeeded De Zerbi at Brighton, attempted several high-stakes routines on their way to promotion from the German second division, but the one common theme was their motivation to push their goalkeeper forward. to help. with the ball after receiving it from a defender.
This meant that his long kicks came even closer to the opponent’s goal, with the team higher up the pitch when contesting the resulting second balls.
All these teams are varying their approach, as is new Liverpool head coach Arne Slot.
However, when his Feyenoord team played too little with the intention of breaking the press, they did so in a much more brutal manner than most.
Here, against NEC Nijmegen in the Dutch top flight earlier this year, Feyenoord has goalkeeper Justin Bijlow stand still with the ball and delay his pass until the very last moment, and centre-back Thomas Beelen is trusted to dribble across his own penalty area and wait for a space is created.
This is a freer approach, but there are obvious risks to playing this way in your own penalty area, as many teams have discovered over the past five years. That explains why baiting with a pass to the goalkeeper and then going long has become the go-to strategy for most top teams.
Football underwent significant change five years ago and we are only now beginning to understand how much tactical variation has been made possible.
(Top photo: Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)