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Ten days before his final game in charge of Crystal Palace, Oliver Glasner sat down with his four assistant managers and various members of his coaching staff and the club’s analysis department. They were there to hatch a plan to win the Conference League final, Palace’s shot at a third piece of silverware in a year, and Glasner’s parting gift. There was nothing inherently remarkable about that. Glasner, like basically every modern manager, holds a similar sort of meeting before every game. This one stood out, though, in two ways. Firstly, it was early: Palace still had at least one Premier League game before they met Rayo Vallecano. And secondly, it ran late. Glasner and his colleagues talked, and talked, for more than five hours. The purpose of the meeting was standard, too. The club’s analysts would have watched hours and hours of footage of Rayo, picking apart every facet of their play. Once they had presented their findings, Glasner and his staff hatched a bespoke plan to nullify their precise strengths and exploit their exact weaknesses. Most of Glasner’s meetings, now that he is at Nottingham Forest, will not last quite so long. Even allowing for the fact that Palace were overwhelming favourites, it was still a special occasion, a major-ish final. Still, it illustrates the (occasionally extreme) level of scrutiny modern coaching staffs devote to their opponents. Every club now possesses a well-staffed analysis department, employing people to study whoever they are playing next: watching their games, trawling through performance data, producing in-depth reports about what to expect. More and more teams now have in their ranks someone whose whole job it is to assess opposition set-pieces. By the time a game rolls around, a manager knows the team they are facing almost as well as their own. Elite football is so awash with knowledge that analysts and coaches alike see the main challenge as condensing it into a practical, digestible, usable form. Unai Emery, the Aston Villa manager, has a reputation as a great meeting enthusiast: he holds three a week, each running to about 90 minutes. That is longer than most would have traditionally been comfortable with – managers, generally, try to keep video sessions with players to no more than half an hour – but perhaps it is a harbinger. Some players who have grown up with video footage now employ their own analysts. This is football’s information era. The game is swirling in terabytes of statistics, billions and billions of data points about physical output and individual ability and collective endeavour. It is deploying ever more sophisticated technology and ever more brilliant minds and ever more innovative metrics to drive ever deeper into its unseen reality. It is smarter than ever. Whether it is any better is a different matter. *** As seems to be the case every year now Chelsea have spent the summer burning through colossal sums of money. With a couple of weeks of the transfer window remaining, the running total stands at about £350m. Xabi Alonso, the latest inhabitant of the club’s managerial cuck chair, has a squad comprising 34 senior players. Plus youth graduates. Newsletters Choose the newsletters you want to receive View more For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy The most telling signing of their summer, though, was not a player. In June, Chelsea triggered the release fee contained in Austin MacPhee’s contract at Aston Villa. MacPhee, having spent his summer working with Portugal, is the club’s new first team set-piece coach, replacing Bernardo Cueva, a Mexican specialist who had joined from Brentford for £750,000 in 2024. He has been given a new role: technical analyst. With his distinctive long, blond hair, MacPhee has become a familiar sight in the last few years; television cameras have reliably cut to him whenever Villa have won a corner. His reputation, his prominence and, eventually, his transfer feel like a pretty good summary of the state of the Premier League in 2026. The fact that the top flight turned into an artillery battle last season did not exactly go unnoticed. Set-pieces defined the campaign. Arsenal scored 29 goals from them on their way to the title, earning Nicolas Jover, their set-piece coach, his own semi-ironic mural near the Emirates Stadium. Across the league, more than a quarter of all goals came from free-kicks. There was less appetite for exploring the causes of the shift: a bit of discussion of the surprisingly liberal refereeing of ungainly penalty area melees; a few forays into whether it had been driven by the game’s data-crunchers; a decent portion of traditionalist glee that at last English football had cast off the woke nonsense of the Guardiola era. But it seems obvious that the increased focus on set-pieces was a consequence, rather than a cause, a reaction more than a choice: the richest teams in the world were finding it more and more difficult to score goals from open play, to win games by outplaying their opponents, that the league itself was inching ever-closer to a sort of glittering stalemate. Set-pieces were one of the few edges left. There is no single explanation for how, or why, that happened. The fact that England’s teams are so wealthy, so well-stocked, is a factor; the talent gap between sides is not what it was. So, too, the continuing advancements in nutrition and conditioning and the various other disciplines of sports science that enables players to run faster for longer. The fact that many of the best managers in the world are here, too, all able to make five substitutions every game, also helps. But it is hardly radical to suggest that the fact that every team has been able to study each of their opponents in forensic depth, that everyone knows almost exactly what they are going to face every time they take to the field, might contribute considerably, too. *** The story of how basketball changed, perhaps for good, can be told with two heroes. In one version, the more romantic, Steph Curry’s unparalleled brilliance at scoring long-range, three-point shots turned the Golden State Warriors into the NBA’s dominant force. In the other, the starring role goes to Daryl Morey, then the heretical general manager of the Houston Rockets. In this telling, Morey’s investigation of basketball’s data led him to the conclusion that the sport was undervaluing three-pointers, traditionally seen as unreliable and/or self-indulgent. His great insight, in bald terms, was that players could miss more often from beyond the arc and still pick up more points in the long-run. Morey started to build teams that shot from range frequently, maybe even excessively. He transformed the Rockets into a regular playoff presence. That it is the latter which has entered popular myth – teams that shoot heavily from distance were said, for a while, to be playing “Moreyball” – is interesting in itself; it speaks to the modern tendency to afford executives guru status within all sorts of sports. But either way, the impact has been dramatic: the number of three-point shots in the NBA in the last decade or so has risen precipitously. Teams basically no longer shoot from what basketball considers mid-range. Knowledge changes games. A similar process is already underway in football. Coaches have been actively discouraging players from shooting from range for years, advice rooted both in data and Guardiola-infused aestheticism. Between 2004 and 2024, meanwhile, the number of (aerial) crosses from open play per game almost halved. Perhaps, then, the style that came to define the Premier League last season – central defenders trundling forward for long throws, players drawn magnetically to the goalkeeper, endless tussling at corners – is the natural next step, the game’s equivalent of what happened to basketball under the influence of Curry and Morey. As in so many other spheres of existence, we go irrevocably where the data leads. This is the smartest way to play football. The computer says so. Whether that is enjoyable is not, strictly speaking, relevant. In the aftermath of the World Cup final, the American sports provocateur Skip Bayless declared that “Spain won with suffocating defense that rendered [Lionel Messi] just another player. Soccer turned back into what it mostly always has been: boring.” Sam Anderson, writing in The New York Times, was just as disappointed. He made a note that read: “How is this game like this? How is it not different from this?” This is the central tension within football. It does not have a duty to entertain. The people out on the pitch, the people sat in the meetings, the people poring over data: their job is not to find the best way to play, it is – in a sport of impossibly fine margins – to find the best way to win. What are your thoughts on this? Email us at letters@observer.co.uk Photographs by Mario Hommes/DeFodi Images via Getty Images, ANP via Getty Images and Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images