Opta Analyst's Ali Tweedale looks at four emerging trends across the Premier League so far this season.
The new Premier League season is already feeling like a bit of a throwback.
It might only be three matches into the new campaign, but a few things are happening that suggest Premier League football is changing. And much of what we’re witnessing, we’ve seen before.
Football trends often go in cycles, and a few elements of the early part of 2025/26 hint that we are coming back around to a style of play similar to the early part of the Premier League era.
We’re not suggesting the game is going back to the 1990s, but as you’ll find out by reading on, certain aspects are looking more than a little old school.
Here are four trends we’ve noticed at the start of the new campaign.
Long throws
Eleven out of 20 Premier League teams launched a long throw after Matchweek 1 - defined for this exercise as travelling at least 20 metres before the next on-ball action – into the opposition’s box on the opening weekend of the season.
On MW1 of the previous season, just four teams did so.
That was a stark enough difference to write about it, but the two Matchweeks since have given us plenty of reason to think it wasn’t a one-off. Long throws appear to be very much back.
In the Premier League this season, there have been an average of 3.03 long throws (20m+) into the opposition’s box per game.
That’s almost double the rate in any other season in the previous 10 years, with 1.67 per game in 2018/19 the highest rate before this campaign.
Meanwhile, 2020/21 produced just 0.89 long throws into the opposition’s box per game.
Long throws per match since 20/21
| Season | Total |
| 2020/21 | 0.89 |
|---|---|
| 2021/22 | 1.27 |
| 2022/23 | 1.44 |
| 2023/24 | 1.47 |
| 2024/25 | 1.52 |
| 2025/26 | 3.03 |
The slightly higher rate in 2018/19 might have just been the result of Cardiff City, managed by Neil Warnock and Burnley, managed by Sean Dyche, both being in the top flight at the same time.
But this season, just about everyone is at it. Why? Because it is a legitimate route to goal.
Last season, 14 goals were scored following a long throw-in into the penalty area, which is more than any other season on record (since 2015/16), and also more than the two seasons before that combined (eight in 2022/23 and five in 2023/24).
In 2024/25, the chances following long throws totalled 15.9 Expected Goals (xG), so the goal tally could easily and perhaps should have been higher.
That has convinced more teams to invest time in weaponising their attacking throw-ins. And the results have been stark.
Already this season, we’ve seen three goals from long throws – a rate of one every 10 matches.
Even last season when 14 goals were scored from long throws, that was still only one every 27 games.
The season before, one was scored every 76 matches.
Long throw-ins are producing more than twice as much xG this season (0.09 xG per game) as any other season on record.
Everyone is getting better at using throw-ins, and this will surely only continue as teams put more time, effort and thought into how they chuck the ball back into play.
Watch teams using long throw-ins
Goalkeepers are happy to go long
Manchester City selling Ederson and signing Gianluigi Donnarumma has brought the discussion around ball-playing goalkeepers into sharper focus.
While Donnarumma is far from terrible with his feet, his arrival signals a major change for Pep Guardiola.
Ederson is the most technically gifted ball-playing goalkeeper the Premier League has ever seen and Donnarumma, well, isn’t.
Does this mean City are going to start lumping the ball up to Erling Haaland?
Probably not, but they might now do it a bit more than they previously did.
And with numbers from the start of the new season suggesting Premier League teams are increasingly happy to go long, it appears that others are doing it, too.
The proportion of passes played long (passes measuring at least 32m) by Premier League goalkeepers plummeted from 79.3 per cent in 2014/15 to 46.6 per cent in 2023/24, decreasing in 10 consecutive seasons.
Then, in 2024/25, the numbers remained consistent (47 per cent), suggesting a possible change in direction for Premier League football.
The start to this season has seen a bigger increase, with 51.9 per cent of goalkeeper passes played long, so it could well be that long balls really are back.
Goal-kick tendencies arguably paint an even clearer picture of just how much things have changed this season.
Long balls – by our definition – don’t always create 50-50s.
A goalkeeper could play a 32m pass from their area out to a full-back in acres of space, and that’s not really long-ball football, is it?
However, goal-kicks that end in the opposition half give us a better objective measure of goalkeepers going long and being happy to risk losing possession.
Goal-kicks into the opposition’s half don’t always lead to an aerial duel, but they usually do.
After dropping every season from 2016/17 to 2024/25, the proportion of goal-kicks that have reached the opposition half has risen sharply in 2025/26.
We’re only three matches in, but it looks like a big enough rise that it could prove significant.
Why is this happening, then?
It’s probably something to do with the fact that many Premier League teams are such exceptional pressing units that even the most idealistic managers, once so committed to keeping the ball on the floor, are starting to have doubts about playing out with intricate passing moves close to their own goal.
Perhaps the risk is no longer worth the reward.
Alternatively, it might just be about mixing things up more to give the opposition more to think about.
Outfielders booting goal-kicks
A related trend, though a rather more unusual one, is outfielders being the ones to boot goal-kicks up the pitch.
During Bournemouth’s win at Tottenham Hotspur before the international break, centre-backs Marcos Senesi (for the visitors) and Micky van de Ven (for the hosts) both took goal-kicks that ended in the opposition’s half.
Those were two of eight instances of an outfielder booting a goal-kick into the opposition’s half in the Premier League this season, which is already half as many times as it happened in the whole of last season from just three Matchweeks.
So, an outfielder is taking a goal-kick into the opposition’s half 0.27 times per game this season compared to 0.04 times per game last season which, as it happens, was previously the highest rate in any season on record (since 2016/17).
In other words, it is happening more than six times as frequently as any other recent campaign.
Outfielders have been taking goal-kicks for a few years now, but most of them pass the ball to the goalkeeper or to another defender in an attempt to bait the opposition’s press.
This season, they appear willing to go long, but this obviously isn’t because Premier League goalkeepers all of a sudden can’t kick the ball far enough.
Virgil van Dijk is responsible for four of the eight instances of an outfielder taking a goal-kick into the opposition’s half, but goalkeeper Alisson Becker is more than capable of doing it on his own.
It must instead be a ploy to catch the opposition out. If they are set up to charge towards a short goal-kick, then rather than giving them time to reset as the goalkeeper moves over to kick it long, the centre-back is lumping it up the pitch.
Marginal gains, and all that.
Whether it’s worthwhile enough for someone like Van de Ven to put any extra strain on his dodgy hamstrings than they already have remains to be seen.
Kick-offs going straight out of play
A new development this season – in the Premier League at least – is managers instructing their players to kick the ball directly out of play from kick-off to concede a throw-in deep in opposition territory.
It appears to be replicating what Paris Saint-Germain did on their way to winning the treble last season.
Luis Enrique’s side, packed full of talented players and probably the best side in Europe with the ball, decided to kick off their UEFA Champions League final victory over Inter Milan by giving the ball straight to their opponents.
Presumably, some analysts at the European champions worked out that conceding a throw-in near the opposition’s goal was more likely to lead to a chance or a goal than keeping hold of the ball.
And some Premier League teams either liked what they saw from PSG or drew the same conclusions from their own analysis ahead of the new season.
Already in 2025/26, three kick-offs have been booted straight out of play in the final third of the pitch for an opposition throw-in.
That’s three times as many occasions as in the last five seasons combined.
In other words, it’s happened three times in 30 Premier League matches this season, after occurring just once in the previous 1,900.
Kick-offs booted out in final third since 16/17
| Season | Total |
| 2016/17 | 2 |
|---|---|
| 2017/18 | 1 |
| 2018/19 | 0 |
| 2019/20 | 1 |
| 2020/21 | 0 |
| 2021/22 | 0 |
| 2022/23 | 0 |
| 2023/24 | 1 |
| 2024/25 | 0 |
| 2025/26 | 3 |
There had been some instances in previous seasons of the second pass after kick-off being a long ball into the final third that goes out of play, but almost all of them were long balls that targeted a team-mate and were overhit.
That is, they weren’t deliberately kicked out of bounds.
That happened 42 times last season, or 0.11 times per game.
The second pass has been kicked out of play in the final third seven times already this season, or 0.23 times per game.
And this season, they have been almost all been kicked out of play on purpose.
Watch teams launching kick-offs into touch
It’s a curious and surprising development, especially given that in recent seasons, there have been a fair few examples of teams scoring within seconds of taking kick-off thanks to a pre-planned routine.
You’d think that if one kick-off trend was going to catch on, it’d be the one that led to goals, not the one that involves giving the ball away to gain territory as quickly as possible.