LIKE the consumption of white bread and pesticides, we are increasingly aware that shooting from long range is not the best choice to make.
In the years since the Expected Goals model became sentient, the average distance of shots from goal in the Premier League has declined season by season. The thinking managers are winning, the compilers of top bins screamer compilations are not.
And yet the sheer aesthetic joy of the long range goal cannot be denied, even if you’re Pep Guardiola. Perhaps especially if you’re Pep Guardiola, given that last season’s league title was ostensibly delivered via Vincent Kompany’s unlikely boot. Typical, 95 goals at an average of 11 metres and everyone remembers the 28 yarder.
Vincent Kompany with 37 shots from outside the box in his PL career. One goal. Practice makes perfect.
— Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor) May 6, 2019
It’s important to remember that long range goals don’t exist in a vacuum. They emerge as a popular option in eras of defensive solidity, or when clubs can call on genuine experts within their ranks. Of the five Premier League seasons to see the highest proportion of goals from long range, two campaigns stand head and shoulders above the others, 2006-07 and 2007-08.
They tick the low scoring season box (2006-07 is the lowest scoring campaign in Premier League history, the high water mark of the Mourinho/Benitez-led War Against Error) and they also tick the specialists box, with five players scoring five or more long range goals across those two seasons (and what a list it is: Frank Lampard 9, Cristiano Ronaldo 7, Steven Gerrard 6, Didier Drogba 5 and forgotten king of distance Sebastian Larsson).
2013-14, in contrast, was not a season that particularly struggled for goals (it remains the only top-flight season since the 1960s to see more than one team reach three figures) but the likes of Luis Suarez with seven from outside the box, Wayne Rooney with six (21% of his career long range goals came in this single season, a brave attempt to help David Moyes to a good start at Old Trafford) and Yaya Toure and Jonjo Shelvey on five apiece.
Shelvey of course, was at it again last weekend at [the] London Stadium for Newcastle, while people still talk of Toure’s title-winning campaign of 2013-14 in hushed awe. The Ivorian took seven direct-free kicks and scored with four of them. That’s a conversion rate that’s almost exactly the same as Riyad Mahrez from the penalty spot. One of those types of set-piece should be harder to execute than the other.
Lampard remains the Premier League’s grand master of the long range goal, his total of 41 more than any other player and more than 20 of the 49 teams to have featured in it. The Chelsea manager was no doubt pleased, then, to see Fikayo Tomori score from outside the box at Wolves this season with what was his first ever shot in the English top-flight.
The top three of current players is Christian Eriksen with 22, Gylfi Sigurdsson with 21 and Sergio Aguero, often dismissed as merely a penalty area predator, with 20. In purity terms, Pedro Mendes still leads; all six of his Premier League goals came from outside the box, and it really should have been seven but for a Roy Carroll/Some Linesman incident at Old Trafford when he was playing for Spurs.
The record for a player in a single season was the nine that Gareth Bale scored in 2012-13, each one a vigorous tap on Real Madrid’s shoulder. The only other men to score more than seven in a single campaign are Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink in 1998-99 and, inevitably, Matthew Le Tissier in 1994-95.
Liverpool would have won the 2018-19 Premier League title if long-range goals were worth double. pic.twitter.com/dEEXnz0sUa
— ESPN UK (@ESPNUK) May 17, 2019
In terms of ratio between open play and set-pieces, Rickie Lambert leads as the player with the most long range goals with all of them coming from direct free-kicks (four), while Paul Scholes and Jermain Defoe are at the other end of the scale, with 22 apiece from outside the box but none of them from a dead ball.
Fourth in that list is Andy Cole, who perhaps isn’t a player you immediately associate with long range goals (he has 17), while Benito Carbone justified at least some of his exorbitant turn of the century salary by scoring 13 times from outside the box, from an overall total of only 35.
Team-wise, Liverpool are the only club to have scored more than 300 long range goals in the Premier League (311) but Manchester United lead the way with direct free-kick goals on 63 (15 more than their rivals from Merseyside). A no doubt Carbone-fuelled Bradford City are the team with the highest proportion of long range goals (16 of 68) in Premier League history, followed by Nottingham Forest (50 of 229) and Portsmouth (62 of 292).
At the other end of the scale are current top-flight dwellers Brighton with just seven of 83 coming from outside the box and only one direct free-kick. They are followed by Wimbledon who scored 384 times in their time in the Premier League but only 35 times from long range. Of the ever-present Premier League sides, Arsenal have the lowest proportion of such strikes (236 of 1861). The club with the reputation for trying to walk the ball into the net prefer to shoot from closer in. Who knew?
So, even as cruel, joy-crushing analysts try and ban the honest English long-range goal, we can still enjoy them from time to time, recognising that they may not be the wisest choice for a footballer to make, but my goodness are they aesthetically pleasing. Raise a glass to the goal of the month compilation in the sky and if the ball goes loose, why not just have a pop?
