{"id":908271,"date":"2026-09-28T06:58:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T06:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/908271\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T06:58:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T06:58:09","slug":"premier-league-is-top-flight-possession-football-on-way-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/908271\/","title":{"rendered":"Premier League: Is top-flight possession football on way out?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the early 2000s, Premier League defences tried to make the pitch as small as possible, giving their opposition less space to score in.<\/p>\n

Coaches therefore encouraged their attackers to play quickly, taking advantage of open space that saw them face fewer defenders.<\/p>\n

Logically, this made total sense.<\/p>\n

It was Pep Guardiola’s influence that, in part, flipped this logic on its head over the last decade.<\/p>\n

His Manchester City<\/a> sides looked to force teams back into a compact defence, a challenge that in theory should be harder to break down.<\/p>\n

The counter logic was that they were forcing opponents to give them a familiar challenge they were prepared for.<\/p>\n

City’s defenders also had big spaces to cover, often standing at the halfway line. <\/p>\n

But for Guardiola, those spaces were less worrying if the ball stayed near the opposition’s goal for as long as possible.<\/p>\n

After all, if you have the ball, the opposition cannot score.<\/p>\n

So why now are teams that dominate the ball dropping points?<\/p>\n

Across this season’s opening 50 Premier League matches, teams recording at least 60% possession have won only 36.4% of those games, while in 2023-24, the figure was 53.5%.<\/p>\n

Does this suggest possession football is on the way out? Well, the answer isn’t that simple. <\/p>\n

Are teams winning because of their low possession, or having less possession because they have taken the lead early?<\/p>\n

There could be some truth in both answers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the early 2000s, Premier League defences tried to make the pitch as small as possible, giving their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":908272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-908271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=908271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/908272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=908271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=908271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=908271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}