There is a peculiar kind of outrage in English football, one reserved not for failure, but for cleverness. Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal have discovered this the hard way. In a season where they have shattered the Premier League record for goals scored from corner kicks, the response from a section of pundits and rival camps has not been admiration. It has been something closer to disgust.
Chris Sutton declared they would be the “ugliest” English Premier League champions in history. Managers have complained about the time taken to set up routines. Former referees have called for rule changes. And yet, the fundamental question nobody seems willing to answer is this: why, exactly, is winning a problem?
Football has one objective: score more goals than your opponent. There is no sub-clause requiring those goals to be aesthetically pleasing. No FIFA regulation stipulating that a header from a corner is less valid than a 30-yard thunderbolt. The Laws of the Game are, in fact, quite clear, and Arsenal have not broken them.
The criticism around blocking and screening during set pieces deserves scrutiny. Physical contact in the penalty area during a set piece has been a feature of football since its earliest days. Defenders hold, pull, and wrestle at every corner in every league in the world. Arsenal have simply had the audacity, and the tactical intelligence, to codify and choreograph their response. The fact that they are better at it than everyone else is not a moral failing. It is a competitive advantage.
Let us consider the historical record. When Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest won back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980, they did so with a brand of compact, counter-attacking football that many purists of the era dismissed as overly pragmatic. Nobody remembers them as cheats. They are remembered as champions.
When Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona rewrote the laws of pressing and possession with their 2009-2011 side, the world applauded. That was genius. When Diego Simeone built an Atletico Madrid side capable of suffocating the best teams in Europe through defensive organisation and set-piece efficiency, he was celebrated as one of the sharpest tactical minds of his generation. The common thread? All of these teams found a method that their opponents could not solve and executed it relentlessly.
Even the dark arts of set-piece defending have long been normalised. For years, Tony Adams’ Arsenal back four was reviled for their aggressive, almost mechanical offside trap. Opponents hated it. Commentators mocked it. George Graham was called a fossil of the game. Yet that defensive unit is now rightly celebrated as one of the most tactically sophisticated in English football history. Context has a way of correcting the record.
The suggestion that Arsenal’s style is somehow beneath the Premier League is worth pulling apart. Stoke City under Tony Pulis built a top-flight survival machine around long throws, aerial duels, and brutal physicality. It was never pretty. It worked. Pulis was named Premier League Manager of the Season. Nobody called for a rule change to nerf Rory Delap’s throw-in range.
Brentford’s rise under Thomas Frank was built substantially on set-piece excellence, their data-driven approach to free kicks and corners in the Championship drew widespread admiration and think-pieces about the future of analytics in football. The Bees were held up as proof that smaller clubs could punch above their weight through intelligence. Arsenal, applying the exact same principle with greater resources and precision, are somehow doing something wrong?
The inconsistency is glaring. Tactical innovation is celebrated right up until it becomes too effective. Then it becomes a problem that needs to be legislated away.
Behind Arsenal’s corner record is Nicolas Jover, a set-piece coach who has spent years at clubs including Brentford and Manchester City refining the science of dead-ball situations. Every routine Arsenal run is the product of hours of preparation, video analysis, spatial reasoning, and physical rehearsal. The players who execute those routines — Gabriel, Saliba, Rice, Timber — do so with the same discipline required for any other tactical system.
Football at the elite level is decided by small margins. One goal separates teams in a third of all Premier League matches. Set pieces account for roughly a third of all goals scored in the competition. Any manager who chooses to ignore that arithmetic is not principled. They are negligent.
Arteta has not chosen corners over open play. He has chosen corners in addition to open play. The criticism often implies a false trade-off, as though scoring from a set piece somehow cancels out the 65 minutes of intelligent pressing and progressive passing that created the corner in the first place.
Football is not a beauty contest. It never has been. The teams etched into history, from Herrera’s Catenaccio Inter Milan to Mourinho’s Chelsea to Guardiola’s City, earned their legacies by finding a repeatable way to win and having the belief and organisation to sustain it. Arsenal are doing precisely that.
If the critics want to change the rules, they are welcome to make that case to IFAB. But as long as the laws stand as they are, condemning a team for mastering a legal, skillful, and brilliantly executed part of the game is not analysis. It is envy dressed up as principle.
Arteta is building something. The corner goals are not the whole picture, they are simply the most obvious proof that, at Arsenal right now, every detail counts. That is not ugly football. That is modern football, done properly.
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Source: Business Insider Africa
