The American Premier League 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇺🇸

Now we’re getting somewhere. We now know more than half the field for the World Cup next summer; all of a sudden, it feels like the tournament is starting to take shape. The majority of the African, Asian and South American contingents are decided; thanks to a heroic victory against Latvia on Tuesday night, England became the first European side to join them.

I’m not sure anyone would suggest that Thomas Tuchel’s side were the story of the international break, though. That honor probably falls to Cape Verde, which will make its World Cup debut next summer; only one smaller nation, Iceland, has ever qualified for the finals. But South Africa’s return, 14 years on, is a wonderful prospect, and I found myself oddly heartened that Qatar have qualified, too. Maybe that World Cup wasn’t a complete waste of time from a sporting perspective.

As unpopular as these international interludes are, I’m more and more sure that they’re good for our collective mental health, soccer’s equivalent to a digital detox. The club season feels so all-consuming, so overwhelming that a change in focus, even a temporary one, is good for us. It breaks the dopamine addiction, briefly, and resets us to go again.

Appropriately enough, the mural is on the corner of the wall. The artistic merit of the painting of Nicolas Jover, Arsenal’s set-piece coach, that appeared in the tunnel on the Hornsey Road, just outside the Emirates Stadium, last year is a matter of taste. Its placement, though, is perfect. As an in-joke, it is absolutely flawless. 

When it first appeared – in a gallery of street art dedicated to various icons of the modern Arsenal – the reflex response from rival fans was to sneer. This was not a surprise. What are rival fans for, after all, if not sneering at things? In this case, though, it felt if not justified, then at least comprehensible. Anointing a set-piece coach, no matter how good and no matter how significant, as a hero is an unusual step.

Looking back, it is clear that scoffing at Arsenal’s affection for the man who masterminds their corners was short-sighted in the extreme. Jover more than deserves to be preserved for posterity. Not just for his impact in North London – Arsenal is, without doubt, the most dangerous team from set-pieces in Europe – but for his significance far beyond it. Absurd as it might sound, the 43-year-old may well be the most influential figure in the modern Premier League.

If we’re all completely honest, that sounds like a stretch, and yet it may not be quite as absurd as it seems. One of the challenges of a journalist in the early stages of each Premier League season is separating signal from noise, working out what is a coincidence – or, at best, a passing fad – and what is a meaningful development, a tangible trend, an actual thing.

This most often manifests in managerial firings. There will, most years, either be surprisingly few dismissals in the first few months of the season, or a raft of them. The temptation, in either circumstance, is to interpret them as indicative of some broader truth. Has the Premier League finally learned the value of patience? Is the Premier League more ruthless than ever?

I have, over the years, written both. Several times. And then I have repented as, a year or so later, the precise opposite to whatever sweeping conclusion I had drawn plays out. There is no pattern here, no larger truth to draw; it is all entirely dependent on individual contexts. My working belief now is that the life expectancy of managers basically functions like a biennial pendulum: lots of dismissals one autumn tends to mean not so many the following year, and vice versa. 

Over the last few weeks, then, I’ve been doing my best to resist giving voice to my suspicion that something fundamental has shifted within the Premier League. Yes, fewer and fewer teams appear to be trying to play some sort of Pep Guardiola-inflected possession game. Yes, more and more of them are apparently happy to go long, or at least longer than has become normal, to adopt the sort of direct style that English soccer has been so desperate to grow out of for the last quarter century.

And yes, there appears to be an increased emphasis on set pieces: not just in the sense that a majority of the league’s teams now employ a specialist coach, akin to Jover, to maximize everything from free-kicks and corners to the resurgent long throw, but in the sense that they are seeking to turn more and more moments into set-pieces.

The best example of this, although it is one that is difficult to explain to more wizened fans, is kick-off. Kick-off is, of course, a set-piece. Everyone knows it is a set-piece. And yet it seems to me like a relatively recent development that teams are treating it as such, and designing specific strategies around one of the few moments in the game when they know they will have the ball.

Brentford, last season, scored in the first minute of three consecutive games; Thomas Frank’s team were using it as a chance, effectively, to run a play. Newcastle, like Paris St-Germain, have taken to booting the ball straight out of play from kick-off, a tactic borrowed from rugby. The logic here is that the subsequent throw-in, deep in the opposition half, functions as a set-piece, too; it is a chance to press an opponent from a standing start.

But it has been – and to some extent still is – difficult to tell if this is just a craze sweeping the league, or if it is something more lasting, whether this is an exception or whether it will prove to be the Premier League’s new normal. Surely teams will figure out how to defend long throws? Someone eventually must find a way to nullify Arsenal’s corner strategies, right? The Premier League isn’t going to sacrifice its aesthetics on the altar of efficacy, is it?

Increasingly, I think that is not how this plays out. I’m relatively sure something major has changed, and that Jover himself explains some of it. 

His role – set-piece coach – is a relatively new one. Until quite recently, designing corner and free-kick routines was just part of the remit of one of a manager’s assistants. It is only in the last few years that it has been hived off into a distinct role. Jover was not the first, but he is almost certainly both the most famous and most successful.

That, of course, has not gone unnoticed. The speed with which best practice now spreads in modern soccer is breathtaking. Jover has helped turn corners, in particular, into an extraordinarily reliable source of goals for Arsenal. Other teams have duly taken note. A majority of Premier League clubs now have an equivalent to the Frenchman: a member of staff whose job it is to make them better from dead balls. 

There is an immediate practical consequence to that – more teams are now spending more time on their set-pieces, so it’s no surprise they’re better at them – but more interesting, to me, is what it illustrates more broadly: the massive growth, in both size and scope, in coaching staffs.

There are more people employed to do more specific jobs than even a decade ago. Soccer, in other words, has come to resemble the NFL, where a head coach is supported by a swath of specialists. Thanks in no small part to Jover, the set-piece coach tends to be one of the more prominent; they can, after all, make an immediate difference to a team’s performance.

That is backed up, now, by more comprehensive and sophisticated data than soccer has ever known. That data is not, as I’ve written before, inert: its very existence has a causative effect. What the sport knows influences what it sees as important. Combine that with the presence of set-piece coaches – whose interest is in emphasizing the significance of their role – and it is all but inevitable that dead balls should start to play an outsize role in teams’ thinking. Here, too, the American influence is clear.

There is another factor: timing. Arsenal, increasingly, feels to me like the club that has best grasped the nature of modern elite soccer. This summer, Mikel Arteta spent more than any other Premier League team – yes, even Liverpool – on bolstering his squad; Arsenal’s depth, now, may well be unmatched in Europe. 

His thinking is rooted not just in his experiences of last season, in particular, when injuries to Martin Ødegaard and Bukayo Saka cost him dear, but in the ongoing reality of his club’s calendar. Arsenal wants to play 70 games a season. That requires a much larger squad. (Like Noni Madueke and Kai Havertz, this is another thing Arsenal has plucked from Chelsea.)

The relentlessness of the schedule means, though, that there is very little time for anyone to work on a bespoke and detailed tactical plan – just ask Ruben Amorim – particularly once winter arrives. Managers can hope only to prepare their teams for individual games, to smooth out the roughest edges, to tweak and to adjust and to finetune. The quickest way to do that, of course, is in Jover’s specialism: set-pieces.

The consequences of that have been everywhere in the Premier League this season. Yes, it is still early. Yes, it might yet prove to be a fad. The Premier League is a shark; it is in perpetual motion, forever moving forwards. But the causes are not changing; they are likely, if anything, to become more pronounced. The day of the set-piece coach has arrived.

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Erling Haaland is almost there. Norway’s place at next summer’s World Cup is not confirmed, not yet, but it is almost certain: a single win, really, would do it, so colossal is the country’s goal difference advantage on Italy, the only side that could overtake Stale Solbakken’s team. The best striker on the planet will, barring an epochal collapse, at last grace the game’s greatest stage. 

Haaland has been a source of both pleasure and pressure to Norway in recent years; I wrote, a few months ago and for a different employer, about how seriously the country took its duty to allow the Manchester City striker – as well as his rich supporting cast, led by Martin Ødegaard – to play in a World Cup. The Norwegians felt a keen duty to deliver for players of such rare talent.

That might explain why, a little further east in Scandinavia, the last few weeks have brought such fury. Sweden has a generation of players almost comparable to Norway’s: Daniel Ayari, Lucas Bergvall, Anthony Elanga, Roony Bardghi and, of course, Viktor Gyökeres and Alexander Isak. This is very clearly a team that should be at the World Cup.

Qualification, though, has been a disaster: the Swedes currently have one point from a group that includes Switzerland, Slovenia and Kosovo. The latter has beaten Sweden home and away. When he was fired this week, the country’s coach, Jon Dahl Tomasson – a Dane – could hardly have complained. 

There is a back door by which Sweden can make it; a place in the playoffs may well be the prize for a far better showing in the Nations League. But that is no surefire thing; Isak, Gyökeres and the rest will have to pick their way past opponents of the caliber of Türkiye, Hungary or even Italy. Haaland will be in North America next summer. There’s a very good chance that at least two of the Premier League’s best strikers will not be.

Obviously, the most compelling game this weekend is in the Premier League: the sheer weight of history means Liverpool against Manchester United (Sunday, 11:30 a.m. ET, USA) remains England’s marquee fixture, even if one of them isn’t very good at the moment and the other one hasn’t been very good for a while. Liverpool struggles against back threes; Ruben Amorim may finally have found a game to his tastes.

The more refined choice, though, might be Villarreal hosting Real Betis: two teams based largely around Premier League off-cuts who are now third and fourth in La Liga, tussling for the right to stay (more or less) in touch with Real Madrid and Barcelona ahead of next week’s clásico.

Our first question this week is a subject that feels likely to gather in relevance over the next few months. “With Mohamed Salah entering the twilight of his career,” reader Thomas Tierney writes, “I wonder are the Liverpool scouts and analysts keeping an eye on how Jadon Sancho performs outside the basketcases in Manchester and London? Would they view a rehabilitated Sancho, with a low-ball offer, as a 2026 Chiesa opportunity?”

This is not quite as far-fetched as it might appear. If Sancho can rediscover some semblance of form during his loan spell at Aston Villa, then it may well pique Liverpool’s interest. As we discussed previously, Liverpool tends to remember players it liked rather better than most of its rivals, and it watched him intently during his initial run at Borussia Dortmund.

That said, there is a roadblock. England’s major teams, historically, rarely traded with each other. It has become more common in recent years: there is a well-worn path between Chelsea and Arsenal, while Manchester City has recruited from pretty much all of its domestic rivals at one point or another. But there has not been a direct transfer between Liverpool and Manchester United since the early 1960s. United would love to sell Sancho. It is almost inconceivable that it would consent to sending him to Anfield.

And Esther Lee has made a slightly more personal inquiry. “I am an avid tea-drinker,” she wrote. “I was having a conversation with a British friend and colleague who told me about his preferred tea, Yorkshire Tea, by Taylor’s. Finding out this is from Harrogate, I thought I would ask: do you enjoy tea, and do you like Taylor’s? Or are you a coffee drinker? Are there other famous things from Harrogate we should know about?”

There are many famous things from Harrogate, as it happens, although they would not want to be thought of as famous. They are, like the town, much too refined for that: Harrogate Spring Water; Betty’s Tea Rooms (also owned by Taylor’s); Jon Champion. Agatha Christie once went missing in Harrogate for 11 days. Nobody knows what happened, but I would guess she overdid it on the Fat Rascals.

Admittedly, I am personally not a tea drinker: I like strong Neapolitan coffee, consumed intravenously if possible, and refined sugars. But my wife is, and as a result we do always have a steady supply of tea in the house. And that tea is, without fail, Yorkshire Tea. We wouldn’t be able to have guests if it wasn’t. Hope that helps!

And that is about that for this week. Thanks, as always, for your notes and ideas and questions and quibbles. If you have anything you would like to declare, then please do get in touch: [email protected]. 

Thanks for reading, and have a better weekend than I will, thanks to the resurgent Ruben Amorim…

Rory