Against its will and nature, it appears England has become a nation of footballing aesthetes and stylistic purists after all. Years of railing against the perceived scourge of Guardiolanism and the tragic death of “proper football” had given the impression this mean and miserable isle was the last bastion of footballing brutalism, but it turns out we just didn’t know what we had until it was gone.
The Premier League’s renewed set-piece boom has been cast as a symptom of moral weakness, another rotting offcut of a crumbling world, partly because it is being led by Arsenal. Jamie Carragher, writing in The Telegraph, labelled this a tactical “period of regression” as coaches “look to the past over redefining the future”.
And long throw-ins are considered the most heinous depravity of this unseemly heathenism. Carragher said “they bore me”. Very famous soccer player Jamie O’Hara said: “[Long throws are] killing the game, it’s like watching non-League.” Brighton manager Fabian Hürzeler moaned: “It stops the rhythm. It takes too much time to throw,” and suggested an eight-second limit like goal kicks. Chelsea’s Enzo Maresca reluctantly said: “If we don’t do it, it’s probably because I don’t like it, but you need to evolve in football, so probably one day I will do it.”
It is, of course, a stereotypical misconception that long throws are somehow mutually exclusive from good football, an easy way out rather than a legitimate option for varying your chance creation. Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool were one of the most prolific long-throw teams of the modern era. The only barriers to entry are a smattering of beanpoles and someone who can throw more than 34 metres – the distance between the touchline and the near post.
Throw-ins generally remain a woefully underappreciated and misunderstood tactical area. In his thesis, “The Undervalued Set Piece”, for which he analysed all 16,154 throw-ins from the 2018-19 Premier League season, England assistant coach Anthony Barry, wrote: “Results here suggest throw-in success may be associated with final league performance.
“The findings provide a starting point to support the importance of coaches focusing on the use of throw-in strategy to increase possession and chance creations within professional soccer.”
And yet long-throw acolytes are a vanishing rarity. But I love the blunt pantomime of the whole process, the puritanical efficiency of both idea and execution. The relatively slow delivery pace allows tension to build to a feverish peak in mid-air, like a high, looping cricket shot, creating bizarrely intimate and communal moments of uncertainty.
I love that there appears no correlation between two elite long throwers, a gift seemingly imparted at random and a rare underanalysed part of the game still imbued with a dusting of magic. I love that there are drowsy Sunday League full-backs who can out-throw any Premier League player, a great “my dad can throw further than your dad” leveller. I love that it feels like a genuinely new frontier in a game which flirts with staleness and repetition, disrupting systems football that has never been so complex and exclusive with what is effectively a circus trick.
Then there’s the fascination of the only time an outfield player can legally impact the game with their hands, which feels simultaneously against the spirit of the thing but also charmingly, childishly fun. All of this is made better by a smorgasbord of players and managers clearly considering long throws somewhere between illegitimate and degrading, which only makes inevitably conceding them funnier.
“[Long throws-ins are] like a super weapon and it’s this really intense moment,” former Liverpool, Ajax and Borussia Dortmund throw-in coach Thomas Grønnemark told The Observer.
“When you have such a dangerous weapon, it creates excitement and joy for the team who takes it, but also creates fear from the opponents.”
And these are halcyon days for long throws. Throughout last season, only 578 throw-ins reached the penalty area, about 1.5 per game, following a steady year-on-year increase from 0.9 per game in 2020-21.
‘It comes down to lack of knowledge because throw-ins can be beautiful no matter what the style you play’
Coach Thomas Grønnemark
But this season there have been 455, or 4.1 per match, on course for a runaway record of 1,558, almost triple the recent peak of 635 from 2018-19. And teams are getting provably better at them – this season there have been 1.1 shots per match as a result of long throws, up from 0.4 in 2024-25, and 11 goals, almost surpassing last campaign’s 14, five of which were scored by Brentford. Both Brentford and Crystal Palace have already scored three each this season.
There are, of course, bad habits around long throws which could do with curtailing. When Brentford beat Liverpool in October, Michael Kayode and Kevin Schade spent almost five minutes preparing for long throws, which included one of Kayode’s attempts taking 61 seconds. But football’s lawmaker Ifab is exploring options for a shot clock, as Hürzeler has demanded. Even a 30-second limit would seem an improvement, and add to the theatre.
“I don’t want all teams in the Premier League to take many long throw-ins,” Grønnemark said. “Fast and clever throw-ins close to the opponent’s penalty area can be just as dangerous as a long throw. I love a fantastic long throw-in, but there can also be too many.
“A lot of teams are just hurling it in there. You can be lucky sometimes. But these teams that are having really big success, they’re taking time in training to do it.”
And it is worth briefly looking at why we are here. As with the entire set-piece boom, the resurgence of long throws are a logical response to fixture congestion, easier to practise than intricate and automated passing moves. If you want this much football, play is inevitably going to tend towards efficiency. There is too much money at stake for teams not to explore every facet of the game, stretch every loophole to their inevitable extreme. And the late Guardiolan cycle left a number of clubs with smaller goalkeepers and slighter defenders, which was always eventually going to end badly.
The whole fad has unfolded in a very 2025 manner; systematised, overstated and overdramatised, hailed as not just the end of football but of common decency and sportsmanship and people working hard for things.
There is little doubt that it will not last in its current vein as teams learn how to defend them better, but it does feel like there has been a fundamental and widespread shift in how throw-ins, particularly long throws, are considered long term.
“It comes down to a lack of knowledge,” Grønnemark said. “If we start to talk about throw-ins in a more knowledgeable way, the fans will also start to talk about them in a different way. I think we should have more qualified opinions because throw-ins can be beautiful no matter what playing style you are.”
The long, long history of long throw-ins
The first record of something akin to a long throw-in comes from an 1882 England v Scotland international. With the game predating a unified code of rules, the English players convinced Scotland to allow throw-ins to be taken however they chose, failing to mention they had been practising a one-armed throw similar to a modern goalkeeper lobbing a ball upfield.
William “Billy” Gunn, who also played Test cricket, where he was a renowned fielder and elegant batsman, spent 90 minutes launching throws from the England half into the Scottish penalty area. The FA codified the two-handed throw the following year.
While at Preston in the 1930s, Bill Shankly was among the first long-throw specialists, honing his technique by hurling balls over rows of terraced houses, and employing a team of local kids to retrieve them. The first goal directly from a throw-in came in 1938, Barnsley half-back Frank Bokas’s effort deflecting in off the Manchester United goalkeeper.
Largely, the history of long throws is a story of opportunism, emerging if and when teams discovered a player capable of reaching the requisite distances.
The defining long throwers of the 1970s were both strikers: Chelsea’s Ian Hutchinson and Newcastle’s Malcolm Macdonald, but there were various specialists throughout the decade, including Cardiff’s Bobby Woodruff and Tottenham forward Martin Chivers. Hutchinson forced an Ipswich defender to score an own goal from one of his throws during his Chelsea debut in 1968, and most famously set up David Webb’s header to win the 1970 FA Cup from the touchline. Chelsea dedicated time to training routines based around his throw.
But Macdonald won a BBC competition to find the longest throw in English football, beating Chivers in a Highbury final. Hutchinson did not enter and in 2020 Macdonald told The Times he believed it was because he knew he would lose. Appreciation and understanding of the long throw as a tactical tool continued to develop in obstinate pockets. At the 1982 World Cup, Ron Greenwood’s assistant Don Howe planned long throw-in training with the England squad, and Bryan Robson’s goal after 27 seconds against France came after Steve Coppell’s throw was flicked on by Terry Butcher.
Long throws were increasingly popular in the 1990s, and Andy Legg and Dave Challinor were the Hutchinson and Macdonald of the era. Swansea defender Legg set the Guinness World Record for the longest throw-in in 1992 – 44.6 metres – before Tranmere’s Challinor hit 46.34m six years later.
We then arrive at Bolton under Sam Allardyce and Stoke under Tony Pulis, two of the premier exponents of the form. Pulis did not focus on throw-ins until a training ground game unveiled Rory Delap’s gift.
A javelin thrower in his youth with a flat, accurate throw, Delap (left) is now synonymous with the art – Stoke scored 24 goals from long throw-ins across four seasons, including a quarter of their 38 Premier League goals in 2008-09. Pulis claims Arsène Wenger complained to the FA about Delap’s throws while he publicly labelled them “a little bit of an unfair advantage”.
After Delap left Stoke in 2013, long throws returned to their status as an opportunistic oddity. Grønnemark’s hiring by Liverpool in 2018 was a significant moment for legitimising throw-ins as a serious tactical frontier. He also worked with Brentford, who have remained ahead of the curve on throw-ins since before their Premier League promotion.
The world record, held for a time by Grønnemark, was broken again by Michael Lewis in 2019, reaching 59.817m using the acrobatic flip-throw technique only Newcastle’s Steve Watson has pulled off in the English top flight so far.
Photograph by Alex Broadway/Getty Images