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League of Ireland Horse Racing TV Listings GAA Fixtures The Video Review Sport meets news, current affairs, society & pop culture Rugby Weekly Extra Dive into all the news and analysis 3 times a week The Football Family Weekly insights from the week’s big talking points Advertisement More Stories Thomas Frank.Alamy Stock Photo Money and control-obsessed coaches at root of the enshittification of Premier League The Premier League has never been so stop-start as it becomes obsessed with set pieces. 6.31am, 31 Oct 2025 Share options Gavin Cooney OUR STAND-OUT moment of last weekend came 72 minutes into Real Madrid’s 2-1 win over Barcelona, when Vinicius Junior saw his number blink onto the substitutes’ board. Affecting a theatrical shock and a truly exquisite indignation, Vinicus flounced off the pitch yelling, “Always me! I’m leaving the team! It’s better if I leave! I’m leaving!” before storming off straight down the tunnel. A year ago Real Madrid boycotted the Ballon D’Or ceremony because Vinicius didn’t win. Now the team is built around Kylian Mbappe and Vini’s being hooked so Madrid can close out a win in the world’s most famous game. Life comes at you fast. There was plenty of moralistic condemnation of Vinicius after his outburst, but so numbed has this Premier League-pilled column become that our instant reaction was to defend his right to act like a brat, because you don’t see these egobursts in the Premier League anymore, where everyone has by now submitted to the supremacy of the coach. (This is not to say the Premier League is free of egos, of course, but nowadays they kick up their fuss in bouts of passive-aggression, through off-season strikes and the salty social media posts.) That the coach is the star in the Premier League was evident in the ‘Super’ Sunday trundling its way through a few hours on Sky Sports around the Clasico. Six of the 12 goals scored across five Sunday games came from set pieces, and if you take the Woles/Burnley thriller from the bottom of the league out of the mix, that figures rises to five set-piece goals out of seven from the remaining four matches, which featured four of the top five in the current table. The set piece is of course the realm of the coach, to the point that any self-regarding club nowadays has their own set piece coach, some of whom are now verging on celebrity status. They can be studied and designed and practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced. They are not a talentless exercise – Arsenal are the industry leaders because of the exceptional quality of Rice and Saka’s delivery – but nor can they be said to be the product of any kind of ingenuity or improvisation by a player on the pitch. Which, after all, was largely the reason people gravitated to the sport in the first place. To misquote Jamie Carragher: Nobody grew up dreaming about being Nicolas Jover. Advertisement Arsenal set piece coach Nicolas Jover with Mikel Arteta.Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo But we are living in The Jover Paradigm. The BBC this week did their own totting up, and found that a record 29% of all Premier League goals this season have come from corner, with the previous high coming in at 14%. Long throws per game have meanwhile almost trebled on last season, up from 1.52 to 3.99 per game. This column believes this, like everything else, is a consequence of the Premier League’s propulsive force: money. On a basic level, Premier League coaches have never had so much money at their disposal, which in turn allows them exert more control over squad building than ever before. And given coaches are forever and always prey to the temptation to reduce risk, set pieces are a great means of doing so. A decade ago, Pep Guardiola sought to reduce risk by hogging the ball in open play, giving his players very specific positions to take up on the field relative to where the ball was. This, however, did leave them open to the occasional opposition counter-attack. Set pieces allow for the same level of intense choreography while also controlling for the counter-attack. As Arsenal are now demonstrating, set pieces are also a highly effective means of breaking down deep-lying opposition defences, but these deep-lying defences are themselves a product of the vast financial inequality at play in the Premier League. You can also chalk the set-piece obsession down as another unintended consequence of the disastrous VAR. The primary defence of VAR is that there is too much money riding on games to be decided by obvious refereeing errors, but VAR has also exposed just how weighted set pieces are to the attacking team, who not only have the ball but the chance to manipulate the whole scene to their advantage. Previously, defenders could balance things out a little by committing fouls for which they would now be pinged by Stockley Park’s finely-attuned eye. Premier League goalkeepers, meanwhile, have lost their protected species status on corners, which was repealed as part of the League’s ‘let it flow’ attitude, which was instituted in response to VAR interruptions. The utter nonsense of this permisiveness has now been exposed: in trying to speed up the game by whistling for fewer fouls, the game is now being stopped more often than ever so teams can avail of the opportunity to get away with what would have previously been a foul. We know the Premier League sees ball-in-play time as the chief metric of their own entertainment value, but the Times recently reported that it has dropped an average of two-and-a-half minutes per game this season, from 57 minute last season. Across a 380-game season, that’s the equivalent of 10-and-a-half games lost for Kevin Danso’s right to dry the ball with a towel. Much of the commentary around set pieces have asked us to drop the “snobbery” around set pieces, given their effectiveness. But a slower and more stop-start game is an objectively worse spectacle for the general viewer, so it’s important you retain your snobbery here. You may point out that Brentford’s victory over Liverpool was both rooted in set pieces and the most entertaining game of last weekend. The entertainment value there, however, was in the upstart bloodying the nose of the wealthy aristocrat, rather than anything aesthetic. And when you remove that context and instead have the wealthiest teams using the same method against each other, then you get what we have been watching for much of this season: the enshittification of the Premier League. So, long live the absurd and petty insubordination of Vinicius Junior. Can you imagine how he would react to the set piece coach who would tell him, Vini, we need you to stand here on our inswinging corners and here on our outswinging corners so you can get a block on their defender to allow one of our centre-backs get contact at the bac-Vini? Vini! Where are you going!? Gavin Cooney Viewcomments Send Tip or Correction Embed this post To embed this post, copy the code below on your site Email “Money and control-obsessed coaches at root of the enshittification of Premier League”. Recipient's Email Feedback on “Money and control-obsessed coaches at root of the enshittification of Premier League”. 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