Culture
Five years of the ‘new’ goal-kick law – this is how it has transformed football
It was in the autumn of 2017 when goal kicks first started to become viewed as a legitimate attacking instrument.
After signing from Benfica, it soon became clear that the left leg of Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson was more of a trebuchet than a human limb, capable of striking the ball 80 yards over the top of the opposition defence to set up goals.
The ploy befuddled teams, as it was something that had not been seen before. City’s entire front three would position themselves 20 yards beyond the opposition back line, safe in the knowledge they could not be offside from a goal kick.
This set-up from a City goal kick is great. Players stretched out all over the place, the opposition have no idea whether the pass is going to go short, into the big hole in the middle, or straight up top. Ederson really has changed the game. pic.twitter.com/hhzQBJuJP1
— Sam Lee (@SamLee) April 28, 2019
There are an average of 16 goal kicks in a Premier League match, which makes the scenario the third-most-common set piece behind throw-ins and free kicks.
Until 2017, however, presumably because geographically in terms of the pitch they start just about as far from the opposition net as possible, goal kicks had largely been performed off the cuff and without much thought, seen as nothing more than a requirement to restart play rather than a set piece that could be mapped out and used against your opponent.
On most occasions, teams pushed everyone up and the goalkeeper smashed the ball as far as he could, an act in English football widely soundtracked by fans behind his goal shouting, “Oooooooooooh…! You’re s**t! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!” — originally as an attempt to distract the goalkeeper involved, later as a form of pantomime to amuse themselves.
For decade after decade, goal kicks were invariably hit long and with little strategic thought (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty)
Then, in summer 2019, IFAB — the body responsible for the laws of the game — changed the one around goal kicks to state that the ball no longer had to exit the penalty area of the team taking it before a player could receive the first pass.
Football has fiddled with the offside rule and VAR has transformed the spectacle, particularly for those attending games, but the change to the goal-kick rule is the most radical change to the style of the sport since the one banning goalkeepers from picking up backpasses was introduced in the early 1990s.
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There were some immediate, albeit expected, changes in behaviour now that the first pass was free to be controlled anywhere inside the penalty area. The number of goal kicks in the Premier League played short has steadily risen and is now more than double the figure in 2018-19, when around three-quarters of them were walloped upfield.
An additional area measuring 44 yards by 18 yards in which to receive the ball may not seem transformative, but in the past five years it has played a significant role in hastening the rise of man-to-man marking, the hollowing out of central midfield and the tactic of playing over the opposition press.
These are three of the themes that UEFA’s technical observer tactical review highlighted from this summer’s European Championship, epitomised by Slovakia luring England into a full press and almost scoring via direct play up to their striker, and the Netherlands creating an overload in the middle of the pitch against high-pressing Austria.
Slovakia almost score from a goal kick against England
The Dutch create a four-v-two in midfield and counter-attack on Austria
It is why the scenarios below — one cluster of players around the penalty area of the team taking the goal kick, another just inside the opposition half and a sea of nothingness in between — have become a common sight across all top leagues.
Tactical camera view of Brighton vs Chelsea
Tactical camera view of Fulham vs Brighton
Man City vs Luton in the FA Cup last season, in which Ederson’s long kicking ability played a pivotal part in several goals
‘The impact of the rule change was underestimated by many,” said Arsene Wenger, the former Arsenal manager who is now chief of global development for FIFA, world football’s governing body, in a review of the rule last year.
“It was introduced to make the game faster and more spectacular, but even more has changed. The main attraction is to attract your opponent as far away from goal as you can, and try to play through. If you can play through the first pressure, you have a whole half of the pitch to be dangerous. That is what is at stake from the start.”
But how does a trend like this start to proliferate in such a quick space of time? And how has it become just as normal to see a centre-back passing the ball to their goalkeeper as the other way around?
It is something Arsenal regularly do, with defender Gabriel playing to ’keeper David Raya before the latter punts long towards Kai Havertz up front and the midfield cavalry race forward on supporting runs.
“What initially happened after the rule change was that it made it easier to build up, as you weren’t having to play this long pass across the box, which gave the pressing team the chance to get there early,” says one first-team coach/analyst at a major European club, quoted anonymously here as they did not have permission to speak.
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“Back then, if the goalkeeper played it to a centre-back, you had locked yourself down to one side of the pitch, whereas now if the defender plays to the goalkeeper, you are dead-centre.
“Most teams bring midfielders to the box now and it just makes the space much bigger to defend. It is so hard to be compact as, if you want to get pressure on at the top end, the midfielders are having to match midfielders, which naturally opens up space behind them.
“The question you are asking the opposition is, ‘Are you so keen to get pressure on us that you are going to leave yourself three-v-three or four-v-four at the back?’ Teams realised they had to commit more bodies to force it long, which explains the rise of man-to-man pressing.”
(Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Every action brings a reaction, however, and that is what has happened, with teams realising they can manufacture false transition moments by isolating their forwards.
“The attacking team’s response has been, ‘If you are going to release six or seven players into the final quarter of the pitch, we’ll get a goalkeeper who can put it over the top of your defence’,” the same coach/analyst says. “There is no space between the lines now to be static and turn on the ball. The concept has changed to become about leaving the big spaces you want to be free and then arriving there at the right moment, so you can run and your marker has to react to it.”
One of the most effective teams in the first few seasons after the rule change were Italy’s Inter Milan, under Antonio Conte. As a coach whose preferred brand of football is about rehearsed patterns of play, Conte took advantage by manipulating the opposition’s setup to leave his attackers with space to run into.
More recently, Germany’s national team have been creative in their use of goal kicks, and in their March friendlies this year they showed us how many different layers are involved in the thinking.
In this example against the Netherlands, goalkeeper Manuel Neuer edges forward with the ball while his midfielders move out from the centre to drag their markers wide and open up a central passing channel to Havertz. The ball from Neuer is the trigger for the supporting cast to coalesce around him, with Havertz’s lay-off springing a four-v-four opportunity.
The new rule gave coaches a blank canvas to go to work on, and has produced many variations in how to try to gain an advantage in build-up.
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Southampton manager Russell Martin has been one of the head coaches who has sought to rethink the setup.
One centre-back drops in line with the goalkeeper, receives, and then waits on the opposition striker pressing him before playing a return ball to the ’keeper, who had pushed up 10 yards so he could be used as the spare man, just like another centre-back.
Leading French club Marseille’s new head coach Roberto De Zerbi was bold in subscribing to almost exclusively short goal kicks in his previous job at Brighton & Hove Albion of the Premier League but he was even more experimental in the two clubs before that at Sassuolo in Italy and Ukraine’s Shakhtar Donetsk.
In his 2020-21 debut season with the latter, he regularly had his team play out with four players inside their penalty box, drawing the press in before finding the spare man after they had lured the opposition players to one side.
Last season, Hamburg-based St Pauli, whose manager Fabian Hurzeler has succeeded De Zerbi at Brighton, attempted various high-stakes routines on their way to promotion from the German second division, but the one common theme was their motivation to have their goalkeeper advance with the ball after receiving from a defender.
This meant his long kicks went even nearer to the opposition goal, with the team higher up the pitch when contesting any resulting second balls.
All of these teams vary their approach, as does new Liverpool head coach Arne Slot.
When his Feyenoord team played short with the intention of cutting through the press, however, they did it in a much bolder way than most.
Here, against NEC Nijmegen in the Dutch top flight earlier this year, Feyenoord have goalkeeper Justin Bijlow stand still with the ball and delay his pass until the very last moment, and centre-back Thomas Beelen is trusted to dribble across his own penalty area and wait for a space to present itself.
This is a more freehand approach, but there are clear risks that come with playing like this inside your own penalty area — as many teams have found out in the past five years. Which explains why setting the bait with a pass to the goalkeeper and then going long has become the go-to strategy for most top teams.
Football underwent a significant change five years ago and we are only starting to understand how much tactical variety has been made possible.
(Top photo: Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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