Arsenal's corners

Both un-defendable and indefensible

Is this really football? Is this what we want football to represent? Watching Arsenal play, especially their set-piece routines, can prompt one to ask oneself this. The team’s rise to the top of the game has had a somewhat paradoxical quality. They are league leaders in England and perhaps the best team in Europe at present. Mikel Arteta has coached them into a meticulous, supremely organised unit. Their positional discipline is exceptional. It has structural rigidity but still allows flexibility—there is, for example, tremendously synchronised movement involving their full backs, who often find themselves among their front five. They also place noticeable emphasis on territorial control. All of this makes them, by most conventional measures, a modern and highly sophisticated football team deserving of the utmost praise.

Yet, that dominance hasn’t always made for pretty watching. When space is constricted, they often struggle to create chances from open play. Their most reliable source of goals comes not from fluid attacking sequences but from set pieces, most prominently corner kicks. Over the past two seasons, they’ve ranked among the league’s most productive sides from dead-ball situations, with a share of goals from corners that sits at the apex, well above the league average. This may not sound remarkable given their overall excellence. It might simply be a case of a good team using an attacking position to their advantage. What is striking, though, is the way these goals are engineered.

Arsenal’s corner routines obviously depend on good delivery—invariably inswingers from Declan Rice from one side, or Bukayo Saka from the other. But even before the ball is delivered, and in the lead-up to it, the team’s attackers cluster tightly together, block defenders from moving, and initiate contact with the opposition’s goalkeeper, creating an almost unwatchable chaos where defending becomes nearly impossible. Arms are used to impede movement, and bodies scurry around not to screen the opposition but to obstruct. None of this is carried out in an especially subtle way. Still, much of it goes unpunished.

Their recent loss to Manchester United exemplified this trait. Arsenal were dominant in possession and enjoyed vast territorial superiority. But every time they got to United’s defensive block, it seemed their intention was to work their way to win a free kick or a corner, which they then looked to exploit to score a goal. For large parts of the match, United’s defenders sought to match their opposition’s physicality, and somehow survived the onslaught. But eventually, Arsenal’s equaliser came from a corner (although they went on to concede a winning goal immediately thereafter).

When you watch that corner back, you can see that Mikel Merino, who got the final touch before the ball trickled past the goal-line, had done enough to impede United’s goalkeeper, Senne Lammens—the kind of contact on the keeper that would once have resulted in a foul, but is, today, only selectively punished. Even if Merino had not made contact, the pressure Lammens was under and the crowd surrounding him would have made it close to impossible for him to make clean contact with the ball.

Arsenal’s tactics in employing these methods are clear: when the ball drops into the six-yard box, they aren’t necessarily looking for clean contact from one of their own players. The melee that results from the cluster of players that they have around the goalkeeper means the slightest deflection from anybody—Arsenal’s own or the opposition’s—can easily result in a goal. This is precisely what happened with Merino’s goal. And it made for decidedly ugly viewing.

Football’s laws do not envisage any special exemption for corners. Holding, blocking, and impeding an opponent remains a foul, wherever the position of the offence. Yet, in practice, in England, this is scarcely enforced on corners. Referees seem reluctant to intervene, unless the attacker’s offence is patently egregious. The Video Assistant Referee, who is given multiple camera angles to consider, also, on most occasions, allows these decisions to go unchallenged.

This selective enforcement leads to a strange asymmetry. Attackers are more willing to push the envelope on what they deem acceptable contact. They impede the goalkeeper, block and grapple with defenders, and the worst they can suffer is the grant of a free kick from the opponent’s own box. On the other hand, for defenders, the calculus is different. Any reactive movement—a push, a tug, even the slightest, misjudged challenge, and they risk conceding a penalty. As a result, the attacking team pushes the limits of physicality on corners, forcing defenders to either accept being displaced or to wrestle as best as they can, all the while walking a disciplinary tightrope.

In Arsenal’s support is a familiar refrain. Football is a contact sport. Set pieces have always had an element of chaos to them, be it corners or long throws. Championships are also not awarded to the most aesthetically pleasing side in the league. Arsenal, after all, know this better than most. During their wilderness years under the later part of Arsene Wenger’s management, they played some of the most attractive football in the league, but lacked the solidity that the best teams often possess.

However, all of this misses a more troubling point. The question isn’t whether Arsenal are entitled to pursue efficiency. Every football team must. But should the game permit teams to use corners as a way to bend the rules on what’s acceptable, leading not merely to bad football but also unfair football?

Nobody is accusing Arsenal of cheating. They are clearly operating within the boundaries of what is presently enforced. Indeed, other teams are also looking to embrace a similar approach. But if this is allowed to continue, football will be the loser. Technical excellence will suffer at the hands of pure physical coercion

Arsenal may yet win the Premier League. They’ve done a whole lot of things well and they will be deserving champions. Yet, their routines on corners must undergo greater scrutiny. If referees look away, Arsenal’s path to success might come to represent something of a template. This will make the game less of an aesthetic spectacle. Ultimately, the executors of football’s rules might want to ask themselves what the game ought to reward: technical invention or brute force?