Brainless goalkeeping is saving football – one 40 yard lob at a time

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The Independent

·5 Desember 2025

Brainless goalkeeping is saving football – one 40 yard lob at a time

The article below is an excerpt from the Adam Clery Football Column newsletter. To get my latest ramblings delivered straight to your inbox, sign up by entering your email address in the box above.

Each edition features an in-depth explainer on one of the week’s biggest tactical talking points, along with a few snippets of other curiosities I’ve spotted in recent matches. There’s even a Q&A section – your chance to weigh in on whatever nonsense has been going on lately.

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I don’t know if you’ve tried introducing any friends to football in the last few years, but it feels like it’s becoming an increasingly difficult sell. The continued robot-ification of every promising player in a youth academy means ‘characters’ are at an all-time low, and the year-round perfection of the pitches means you don’t even get novelty bogs to level some big games anymore.

Cole Palmer’s been fast-tracked to national treasure status purely on the back of not understanding a few questions in a press conference, and a lot of players do struggle to mask how badly they want to deck each other, but that’s about all we’ve got at the minute. Casuals have – and, yes, world’s smallest violin – never had it so bad.

Instead, what we’ve got is a sport where we’re all forced to argue and exclaim over finer and finer margins. Case in point: I reckon Mikel Arteta is currently the best manager in the Premier League, pushing Arsenal relentlessly towards a first title in 20-something years despite missing two-thirds of his first team.

He’s achieved this because he’s so expertly coached a rotational system where three triangles across the pitch allow players to manoeuvre free of man-to-man marking and receive the ball between the lines in normally congested areas of the attacking third and… you see! Your eyelids are going just reading that.

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Triangles (ACFC)

Anyway, there it is if you’re curious, and I really enjoyed watching this against Brentford on Wednesday because Keith Andrews (who a lot of you owe an apology at this point) set them up to be laser-focused on defending these rotations zonally. They weren’t getting dragged around by the movement—instead, they were marking areas of the pitch. It’s innovative, it’s intelligent, it must be incredibly hard to coach, but a friend of mine watched the whole 90 minutes in an effort to give football another go and reviewed it as “really shit tbh.”

And I can’t argue with that! That game’s fascinating if you enjoy seeing two conflicting football ideologies gently rub up against each other for an hour and a half, but I can’t gaslight the general public into thinking it represents entertaining television.

Thankfully though, we still have goalkeepers. And they’re on a global mission to single-handedly keep football entertaining.

This is an opinion I’ve long held. In fact, I can take you back to the exact moment it started: June 27th, 2018, 95 minutes on the clock, Germany desperately needing a goal to stay in the World Cup, loading South Korea’s box to deliver another cross. However, the German left-winger hesitates before the delivery and is caught in possession by Ju Se-Jong. He fires it back up the pitch, finds Son Heung-min, who coolly scores to kill the game at 2-0.

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Firing it up the pitch (ACFC)

One small detail I’ve skipped over: Germany’s left-winger is, somehow, goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, and I found that piss funny at the time. So much so that I included him in the midfield of a ‘worst players of the tournament’ article I wrote for some content aggregation site (been a long old life) and received roughly 50 – quite brutal – messages from the Bavarian region that I wouldn’t dare recount here.

Small note: I’m writing a fair chunk of this the morning after The Independent’s staff Christmas party, and, just in case you’re wondering what cognitive impact that might be having on me, I just had to google whether South Korea – the third biggest country in East Asia – knocked Germany out of the World Cup... o r t h e E u r o s.

Anyway, my point is that goalkeepers are increasingly bringing an element of chaos to a game obsessed with order. In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen David Raya and Robin Roefs beaten from near enough the halfway line in the Premier League, and Kasper Schmeichel conceding at Hampden despite Kenny McLean being virtually in the car park when he took the shot. No structure to the play, no nice rotations – just leathering a ball because the goalie happened to be standing idly on the edge of the box.

There have been two similar efforts in La Liga – most recently Real Sociedad’s Ander Barrenetxea (whose name I dearly, dearly hope I’m never required to pronounce aloud) – and Reyes Cleary – no relation – who just thought, ‘why not?’ while playing for Barnsley. All in all, I can find eight examples of this happening this season, compared with not a single goal scored from more than 40 yards last season.

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Evidence (ACFC)

That’s before you even factor in the best offering from this genre: Harry Wilson capitalising on Vicario’s brain simply falling out and scoring from the touchline against Tottenham. And it’s here that I’m finally going to get to the point of what’s causing this sudden surge in deep, deep goals.

The obvious issue is that goalkeepers are now so involved in the play that their starting position needs to be as advanced as possible. On average, they successfully complete around 70 per cent of all passes inside their own half, up from 35 per cent just 15 years ago, which coax them out to increase their odds.

Also, the more aggressive goalies, like Raya, are regularly completing between three and four defensive actions (tackles, interceptions, headers, what have you) outside their own penalty area, while the league average sits somewhere between one and two. So everyone’s at it.

But that’s not why we’re suddenly seeing all of these goals. The real problem actually lies with every other player on the team – and yes, I am a goalkeeper by trade, why do you ask?

It’s quite neatly (although wrongly) illustrated by Vicario in the aftermath of his own personal howler. Despite having several opportunities to avoid doing the single stupidest thing imaginable, he still lambasts his colleagues for allowing it all to happen. But wind it back, and he sort of has a point.

At this moment, Tottenham have lost the ball and the goal is gaping. Yet neither Palhinha nor Udogie really spring into life to deal with the situation, and both Josh King and Wilson manage to get the shot away without being directly challenged. Likewise, not two seconds prior, Pedro Porro is standing inside the six-yard box and would easily have headed away a speculative shot.

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Vicario's howler (ACFC)

This is a direct result of what happens when players are drilled relentlessly about the zones they’re supposed to guard, and told that diving in and making rash challenges is the worst thing they can possibly do.

They’ve had a lot of the situational awareness monotonously coached out of them, meaning they don’t panic in normal situations but, perversely, don’t react in exceptional ones. Go back to any of these rakers this season and you’ll be able to point to some outfield player not displaying the required amount of panic to frantically stop the shot.

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You can see McLean is going to whallop this (ACFC)

Like, genuine question for Joachim Andersen here. You can see McLean is going to whallop this, and you’ve just seen that the gap between Schmeichel and the goal is big enough to host a decent farmer’s market – why are you backing off to defend the space? Why not just spear him like Edge from the wrestling?

Anyway, long story short, goalkeepers are keeping football well served with slices of unpredictability, and for as long as the rest of the team remain a bunch of soulless automatons, these lobbings are going to continue.