From Liverpool to Bournemouth, long balls are making a comeback in the Premier League
January 31, 2025

England manager — and then it all fell apart.

Under Taylor, England failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, and everyone blamed the duo’s unsophisticated ideas around relying on long balls. The Sun published a picture of Taylor’s face on a turnip days after England were eliminated. And various criticisms of Reep’s nerdy philosophy trickled out over the next two decades. As one headline put it: “How One Man’s Bad Math Helped Ruin Decades Of English Soccer.”

Reep’s one mistake overshadowed a life of ideas that were ahead of their time. Along with another analyst, Richard Pollard, he developed early expected goals and possession value models — long before anyone even cared to count shots or corner kicks. Their core ideas about how soccer worked were mostly correct: accept randomness, get the ball near the goal as much as possible, shoot as often as you can. And you know what?

If Liverpool’s current place at the top of the table and Bournemouth’s shocking challenge for a Champions League place contention are any indication, they might have been on to something with the long balls, too. The long ball is still viewed as unsophisticated and is unpopular in the Premier League, but some of the most successful teams this season are using the tactic the most. What gives?


How the Premier League killed the long ball

My words are not necessary. Just look at this chart:

That’s every season since 2008-09, in chronological order, and how many times a player on any team attempted a pass of 35 yards or more.

It’s not a totally linear decline, but in 2008-09, Premier League teams attempted 51,112 long passes. Last year, that number was all the way down to 38,493. The shifts aren’t really notable from year to year, but if you’ve been watching the Premier League since 2008, you’ve seen more than 10,000 long balls disappear from the game.

And if anything, that’s underselling the scale of change. Because, over the same time frame, the number of total passes attempted in the Premier League has increased:

The percentage of passes that are long balls, then, has undergone an even steeper decline. And more than halfway through this current season, Premier League teams are going long at a lower rate than ever before — at least in the Stats Perform dataset:

The reasons for the shift are clear. Even going back to the Taylor and Reep era, teams in the rest of Europe tended to play a more possession-based game than England’s hit-and-run style. Over time, though, the riches of the Premier League attracted more and more foreign coaches and foreign players.

In 2005, Arsenal’s French coach, Arsène Wenger, fielded the league’s first totally foreign starting 11. That same year, Liverpool, under Spanish manager Rafael Benitez, won England’s first Champions League title since 1999 — and they were only the second English club to even make the final since 1985 (when UEFA banned English clubs from continental competition for five years after the Heysel Stadium disaster). That started a run of at least one English club reaching the European Cup final in six of seven seasons.

PFF FC, Liverpool have attempted 378 over-the-top passes, i.e. balls played over and into space behind the back line.

That’s tied for the league lead with their opponents this weekend, Bournemouth. Andoni Iraola’s side is tied for sixth in points, tied for fourth in goal differential and alone in third for expected goal differential. They’ve already beaten Arsenal and Manchester City, and they’ve destroyed Newcastle and Nottingham Forest by a combined 9-1 scoreline over the past two weeks. Oh, and they’ve done it while attempting the second-most long balls of any team in the league.

Forest, of course, are still alone in third in the table, and they’ve attempted more of what PFF FC calls “contested passes,” which are usually above head height and played into an area where a player will have to compete to win the ball. And while second-place Arsenal rank low in overall long balls attempted, recent analysis from Statsbomb’s Jaymes Monte found their long balls to be the most effective in the league. They also rank in the middle of the pack for balls over the top and contested passes attempted. And the only teams that go long on goal kicks more often than Arsenal are Everton and, yes, Forest and Bournemouth.

Flip it all around, and 15th-place Tottenham almost never go long on goal kicks and attempt the fewest long balls of any team in the league. Southampton are one of the worst teams the league has ever seen, and they’re attempting the fifth-fewest long balls of anyone.

Manchester City, perhaps the league’s biggest underachievers relative to preseason expectations, play the second-fewest long balls, the second-fewest balls over the top and the fewest contested passes. But at least last weekend against Chelsea, they too seemed to find value in booting it long. They attempted 53 long balls — six more than in any game this season — and they won 3-1. All three of their goals came from long passes.

Was this the start of a shift in approach? A recognition from Pep Guardiola, the high priest of the short pass, that everyone above them in the table was finding success by finding a way to kick it long? We’ll get an answer on Sunday, when Man City travel to North London to take on Arsenal.

Regardless of what it means for City, though, the Premier League has gone through a steady revolution: long passes are disappearing from the game, year after year. But whenever the homogenization of strategy pushes too far in one direction, it opens up space for what was once thought to be an inefficient, brutish approach to suddenly become a path to victory.

We’ve seen running teams flourish in the NFL as most of the league has embraced the forward pass, and amidst the NBA’s obsession with 3-pointers, some of the most valuable players in the league are the ones who can convert tough shots inside the 3-point line. Perhaps the Premier League has accidentally created a space where just the right number of long balls can win you lots of games.

As Richard Pollard put it to me a few years ago: “The best way to get the ball into the attacking third from your own half, or from midfield, is a long, high pass in the air aimed to land just inside the penalty area or out wide so the goalkeeper can’t get it, forcing defenders to head under pressure. It has a zero-percent chance of being intercepted along the way and an excellent chance of leading to a ‘regained possession’ in the attacking third from which most goals arise.

“Leading football back into the dark ages was how it was described, but it did OK for Watford.”

And for at least this season, it has done OK for a bunch of other Premier League teams, too.

Source: https://www.espn.com/soccer/insider/story/_/id/43625551/why-premier-league-teams-finding-success-long-balls-liverpool-bournemouth

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