On set pieces and staying sane
Last week, I wrote an article about the one slippery-slope of using data in soccer that I’d always worried about: the path where everyone gets good at set pieces at the expense of everything else. The path that would remove all of the on-the-fly creativity that makes the game worth loving in the first place. I wrote about this when the newsletter was still active, and I made a point of ending my book, Net Gains, with a warning of what could happen. Soccer might end up like baseball.
As I said in the piece, Arsenal are the best set-piece team we’ve ever seen, and they deserve a ton of credit for recognizing how valuable set pieces are and really leaning into it. It has catapulted an already-fantastic team into greatness. They’re probably going to win the Premier League because of this decision — in an even more aggressive version of what Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool did. As I also mention in the piece, Liverpool were the first big team in England to recognize the value of set plays in the current era, and it helped them win the Champions League and the Premier League; it bridged the gap between them and the Barcelonas and Manchester Cities of the world. I wrote about this back in 2019.
In the six-plus years between these two articles, though, other Premier League teams have also become more reliant on corner kicks and throw-ins to score goals. And in this season in particular, set piece goals are up overall, but overall goal-scoring isn’t up, which means that set piece goals have replaced open-play goals. And since set-pieces involve a lot of standing around and waiting, the ball has been in play for less time than in any previous season over the past decade.
As I wrote in the piece, I don’t think this will continue, but if it is the new normal, then it is a problem. There’s less soccer happening, literally, and my opinion is that the game is way less fun to watch when corner-kick goals are replacing open-play passing moves — the brief flickers of brilliance across 90 minutes of boredom are what make soccer, well, soccer.
And then some Arsenal fans saw the headline of this piece and the headline of the piece I wrote about Liverpool back in 2019, and I’m not really sure what the hell happened after that. Someone took a screenshot of the two headlines, put them side to side, and presented it as proof of my bias: set pieces are good when Liverpool score them, but not Arsenal, huh? They’d uncovered hidden proof of my agenda, an article that I never thought anyone would find.
Except, I both link to and mention the Liverpool article in my most recent article. I wasn’t hiding it; the two pieces are of a piece with each other. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I don’t really think anyone who was upset with my most recent piece actually read my most recent piece. Which is why the reaction has blown my hair back quite a bit.
It’s not like I haven’t been called a “scumbag” “piece of shit” “four eyed” “American” “coward” who has “never had sex before” or whose partner “cheats on him with real men” and who “has never kicked a ball in his life” and “needs to quit his job”. That’s the reality of the Internet, especially with a platform like ESPN’s. I hear stuff like that all the time. And I’ll be honest, a small part of me gets a perverse kind of joy when a random Internet commenter tells a person who started on a D-1 soccer team that he’s clearly never kicked a soccer ball before
Now, that’s not OK! This is a universal bad that ultimately benefits neither the troll or the troll-e, just the billionaire who owns whatever platform it’s happening on. But I’m used to it. It’s table stakes for writing about sports in front of any kind of reasonably sized audience these days. And I’m a white dude, writing about games; discourse on the Internet is so much worse than this for so many other people.
But then Arsenal fans started commenting on pictures of my fiancee on Instagram. They’ve accused me of … being a Trump supporter? They’ve found my fiancee’s X-the-everything-app account and started commenting on that. There’s a “Community Note” that now warns users that my article is biased. Someone tried to rally others to tank the reviews for Net Gains. And last night, one guy emailed me — from his personal account! — and threatened to find me and (presumably!) hurt me if I ever wrote about Arsenal again.
Joke’s on him; I’ve already written another article about Arsenal. It’s about how they’re (probably) going to win the Premier League.
Anyway, I just needed to get this all out of my head and into words. It also wouldn’t shock me if some of the aforementioned fans found this and started commenting on it. Normally, I’m able to ignore this stuff, but not when my partner has to deal with it while she’s getting ready for bed or when I’m getting threats on my phone in the middle of dinner. It sucks! It doesn’t feel good! Especially when it feels like you’re getting attacked from a slightly different reality than the one you’re currently occupying.
And so, it made me think of this newsletter and all of the other actually-healthy little communities that still do exist on the Internet. As much as they require a writer or group of writers and thinkers to coalesce around, they also don’t exist without the input or the effort or the empathy of the people who do the coalescing. So, thanks again to everyone who decided to subscribe to this newsletter back when you had to pay for it — or anyone who’s still subscribed to it now. I wouldn’t have been able to do this, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to do this, if it weren’t for you.
This truly sucks. Hopefully, this helps in some way:
I have gathered in reading you that you and I are around the same age and came into soccer fandom at around the same time. When I was about 18, I met a friend in college who, like me, knew that Mateja Kezman played for Galatasaray. Except he was actually much smarter than I was and politely corrected me that Kezman in fact played for Fenerbahçe and not Galatasaray. I had not, up to that time, met anyone who had remotely the interest I had in the Premier League, European soccer in general, etc. It feels kind of insane now, but this was 2006 and it turns out that was a long time ago! Anyway, this person and I became very, very close friends. We developed a sort of language around the game that felt completely unique to us. For almost 15 years, we discussed everything consequential that happened in the soccer world, and the specific context (misguided love for Alan Hutton, using clips of Max Bretos calls to celebrate milestones, a selfie posted with Jonjo Shelvey) for the language built up.
The thing is, when we were around 31 years old, my friend got sick, and then he died. And that beloved context through which I viewed soccer....didn't exactly die but I had no idea what to do with it. I had continual phantom limb effect where I'd go to text my friend about something funny ("i'm thinking of buying a Fred jersey") and feel sad because that text had nowhere to go. Around that time, I started reading more of your writing, and it just....reminded me of him. The appreciation for the game's subtle humor, the bent towards analytics, the pervasive joy of knowing that usually your favorite team does not, in fact, win the title, and that for all the very useful work you can do in breaking down the game into observable parts, shit also does in fact just happen.
I am at a healthier place now and I view what I had with my friend as an incredible gift that was given to me, rather than something stolen. I think your writing, in some way, allowed me to process a piece of what I had lost and also to just feel less alone. I would guess you wouldn't perceive your writing as having that kind of power and influence, but here I am offering proof that it does.
Once again, I am truly sorry that annoying and stupid people are doing....what the billionaire platform owners want them to do. Much of the internet and social media is becoming increasingly nauseating, at least for me. But this is at least one example of the internet/social media ecosystem producing something that I really valued, and that really improved my life. Thanks for putting it into the world.
And by the way....really liked the piece! Lol.
Ryan, I am really sorry this has happened to you (and to your fiancée). Some people are truly awful.