Arsenal are being berated for obsessing over set-pieces, although Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp have already vindicated this approach in the past.
The Gunners sit top of the Premier League table, having won seven of their first nine matches, while conceding just three goals in the process.
Despite this exceptional form, Arsenal are being lamented in the media for their style of play and for how functional their performances have been thus far.
This frustration with the North Londoners appears to derive from their extraordinary record of scoring from set-pieces, with many feeling that Mikel Arteta’s team are at fault for the general move towards focusing on dead-ball situations in the Premier League.
Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool were extremely effective from set-pieces
Arsenal have scored from eleven set-pieces already this season.
Arteta has clearly identified this aspect of the game as one where his team can gain a huge advantage, and he and his coaching staff have subsequently worked tirelessly to master it.
Jamie Carragher has reluctantly admitted that Arsenal’s set-piece threat is ‘pretty special’, although the former Liverpool defender is a rare example of a pundit embracing this.
Many push back on this movement towards maximising threat from dead-ball scenarios, believing Arsenal’s focus on it is what has prompted other teams to replicate it.
However, before the Gunners, there was another team that regularly dominated from set-pieces, scoring countless goals from corners and free-kicks.
This team was Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool. Between the beginning of the 2018/19 season and November 2019, Klopp’s side found the back of the net 40 times from set-pieces – a simply astounding record that rivals the current iteration of Arsenal.
This wasn’t an accident, either. The German became the first manager in Premier League history to hire a throw-in coach, appointing Thomas Gronnemark to the role in August 2018.
Klopp also regularly spoke of the importance of being effective from set-pieces, while he also claimed that goals from these situations were his ‘favourite’, back in 2022.
It’s abundantly clear that the Tactician saw the value in mastering this part of the game, and other clubs were simply not smart enough to catch up with Liverpool at the time.
Fast forward eight years from when Gronnemark was hired, and almost every team in the country has a set-piece coach, because they’re significantly more well-run across the board.
Mikel Arteta’s approach doesn’t need validation
Ultimately, Arteta’s approach to prioritising set-pieces doesn’t need validation.
It should be a given that teams want to use every opportunity to be as well set-up as possible to score. Moreover, in a period when teams are more well-drilled and well-structured than ever before, set-pieces are more important, and thus, more work should be done to be good at them.
People have every right to be frustrated that a higher proportion of goals are coming from set-pieces. The football purist wants spectacular team moves and intricate pieces of skill to decide matches, not headers inside a packed six-yard box.
However, Arsenal are merely responding to mid-table teams becoming better defensively by prioritising an area of the game which is easier to control, and they’re doing it better than anyone else. They’ve been pushed towards this new style.
Eventually, the top teams will become so effective at scoring from set-pieces that it’ll prompt another tactical response from mid-table sides, which will once again change the game, and perhaps make it more open-play centric again.
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