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Nerd stuff alert.

This season of Fantasy Premier League (FPL) feels somewhat different.

A direct result of the entire league feeling different.

Over the past few months, I have published several articles on this new Premier League landscape that present compelling data supporting the idea that we are witnessing less exciting football than in previous seasons.

1️⃣ There are fewer goals, and their distribution has changed dramatically: set-piece goals are on a massive rise.

2️⃣ The number of headed duels has skyrocketed.

3️⃣ Long throws became extremely popular: the number of both expected and actual goals from long throws has doubled (you’re seeing them every gameweek now).

4️⃣ There are significantly fewer shots from counter-attacks and counter-pressing, as teams often opt to play long passes to bypass the press and become more risk-averse.

5️⃣ The ball is in play for about 1 minute and 34 seconds less. Although that doesn’t seem like much, there’s a lot you can get done in that time — go ask my girlfriend.

If you’re interested, you can read about this in one of my previous deep dives:

These are the facts. Numbers don’t lie.

But people often do.

The current landscape is filled with strange narratives, which you should always take with a pinch of salt. In our FPL bubble, the focus is often on shots.

When Harry Wilson and Morgan Rogers (back when he was still a people’s darling, so… quite a while ago) are on a heater, shots from outside the box are suddenly seen as a clever tactic that works perfectly, and Premier League teams are beginning to use these to exploit a skill that this surface-level xG can never truly capture…

You’ve probably heard these opinions many times this season.

They are loud and super convinced.

I have quite a bit to say about that, but first, let’s take a quick landscape check.

Set pieces, no goals, bla bla bla

Some say that this is the worst Premier League season ever.

And as is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Partly, it’s this fading-effect bias, which is a tendency to remember past events more positively than we actually experienced them. At the same time, there is evidence.

We’re on track to see the fewest non-penalty goals in the past four seasons: just 1,036, compared to an average of 1,148 over the previous three campaigns. *Doing proper maths* That amounts to 112 goals fewer.

For example, during the 23/24 season, there were 1,246 goal celebrations. Yes, including those your FPL captain was involved in just as a spectator.

❗ If we compare it to the current pace, we’d see almost 6 goals fewer per Gameweek than two seasons ago.

It’s impossible to specify an exact number of FPL points that goals would earn, but it would be hundreds and hundreds.

The striking difference is the meteoric rise in set-piece goals year on year.

Last season, 20.6% of all goals came from these. This season, that figure has increased to 27.2%, making set-piece goals 32% more common compared to last year.

In absolute terms, we are on track to see 52 more goals from dead-ball situations and 143 fewer open-play goals.

Okay, now the juicy one:

Many say that this season, teams are sitting in deeper blocks than before, forcing opponents to take more long-range attempts, as it’s often too crowded inside the box.

But in reality, there is no data-backed evidence of this happening.

The average height of the defensive line is essentially the same as last season, with only a few centimetres difference. It’s even higher than in the season that holds the record for the most goals scored.

What has changed is that defensive units are more compact, rest defences work better, and teams are harder to break down when they drop deep. But there is still only indirect evidence of this, such as more long balls than ever, and, as already mentioned, fewer goals.

And it certainly doesn’t imply that there’s a trend of teams responding to this by shooting outside the box more often.

You can’t possibly say this without any solid proof.

The real numbers behind long-range shots