ITALY HAS GIVEN us catenaccio, Spain invented tiki-taka, and Germany pioneered gegenpressing while England’s cultural football legacy is…the meatwall.
The meatwall is a phrase coined this season by American soccer writer Michael Caley, and is used to describe the mass crowding of a goalkeeper in his six-yard box on corners that has become the Premier League’s greatest single cultural signifier.
And so it is fitting that the likely defining moment of the season was the microscopic parsing of such a meatwall by the remote authority of VAR, encapsulating as it does the modern Premier League: a muscular, choreographed and unattractive event robbed even of spontaneity by some distant, corporate ruler that nobody wants and yet is told they must have for their own betterment.
To state it plainly: the VAR operator Darren England made the correct decision in disallowing West Ham’s late equaliser, as Pablo clearly grabs David Raya’s arm as the Arsenal goalkeeper leaped to claim the ball. That it took them so long to make the call said more about the stakes of the call rather than its difficulty.
And so justice, in the narrow and limited purview of VAR, was done, and Arsenal will almost certainly now go on to win the Premier League. It is also a fitting denouement of the dull and forlorn season we have witnessed to this point: Premier League Years 25/26 may be directed by Lars von Trier.
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Mikel Arteta and Bukayo Saka. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Arsenal were the chief inaugurators of the meatwall, so there is a bitter irony that they have been the ones to benefit from its sudden and haphazard officiating. Not that Arsenal are its sole practitioners, of course: everyone is doing it nowadays. Liverpool, having whinged about it in the opening weeks of the season, jumped aboard midway through and its the chief reason they are going to stumble into next season’s Champions League.
West Ham are furious, of course, but their complaint is less with the decision than its context. Why have we allowed mass fouling to go on at corners without punishment all season, and yet now you deny us a goal that might help us avoid relegation?
That the VAR operator for this moment was literally named England is perhaps a little too on the nose, for it is the Premier League’s light-touch regulation on corners and set pieces that has allowed the game to devolve to these mass scrums. This has all emerged from the Premier League’s unique response to VAR: conscious that video replay interventions were interrupting and slowing down its product, the Premier League decided they needed to speed up the game where they could, and so arrived the mantra of “let it flow”, lately rebranded as a “high bar” for VAR intervention. In practice, this meant ignoring a series of fouls in the name of the spectacle.
The reality, of course, has greatly diminished the spectacle, and we have seen this play out at set pieces, where goalkeepers have lost their status as a protected species. While fouls as clear as Pablo’s on David Raya have generally – though not always – been spotted on VAR, other sides crowd and bump the goalkeeper in more subtle ways that have not been penalised but have nonetheless affected said goalkeeper’s to use his penalty-box advantage to clear the ball to safety.
The build up to Callum Wilson's disallowed goal. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
And with the referees turning a blind eye to all of this grappling and bumping and pushing and pulling, teams have been incentivised to design elaborate set-piece moves to take advantage of this new-found freedom. Just as the greatest minds of a whole generation of American university students have been paid to move to Silicon Valley and use their talents to persuade social media users to click on an ad, the best-paid coaches and managers in world football have been brought to England to choreograph a series of fouls at set pieces.
This has incentivised teams to focus on set pieces like never before, which has led to a drop in ball-in-play time, while it’s not the case that set piece goals are merely an addition and thus increased the number of goals we are seeing per game: they have come at the expense of goals scored from open play.
The knowledge that a team can score relatively easily from a set piece also means they can take fewer risks in possession: one of the reasons Arsenal are so defensively strong is that their settled possession play is very slow and structured, designed with a great emphasis on avoiding an opposition counter attack. Such has been their set piece prowess, they know they can get away with taking far fewer risks in possession: they are the anti Trent Alexander-Arnold. And Arsenal are far from alone, as virtually all the top sides aside from perhaps Manchester United have got involved to some degree this season.
In a league like this, it’s little surprise that Alexander-Arnold himself has left for Spain, joining the ranks of fleeing talent or never-arrived-in-the-first-place talent. Jude Bellingham went straight from Dortmund to Real Madrid, while Harry Kane left for Bayern Munich. Kylian Mbappe never took his talents to England, while Khvicha Kvaratskhelia picked Paris over the Premier League. With Kevin de Bruyne and Mohamed Salah ageing out of English football, who are the franchise attacking players you’d plaster on the poster for next season’s Premier League? After Bruno Fernandes and Erling Haaland, you have…Florian Wirtz? Bukayo Saka? Declan Rice? Nicolas Jover?
The Premier League has become the coach’s league, rather than the natural destination point for the game’s star players.
Which, when you consider how much money is sloshing around the competition, is a perversely impressive achievement.
Perhaps the sheer amount of attention on yesterday’s incident at West Ham will prompt a rethink from the Premier League and its officials, and a move to start refereeing corners and free-kicks in the same manner as Uefa’s fleet of Helen Lovejoys do in the Champions League. That they do so is an existential matter for the league’s spectacle.
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Late Arsenal-West Ham chaos sums up how Premier League has devolved to mass scrums
ITALY HAS GIVEN us catenaccio, Spain invented tiki-taka, and Germany pioneered gegenpressing while England’s cultural football legacy is…the meatwall.
The meatwall is a phrase coined this season by American soccer writer Michael Caley, and is used to describe the mass crowding of a goalkeeper in his six-yard box on corners that has become the Premier League’s greatest single cultural signifier.
And so it is fitting that the likely defining moment of the season was the microscopic parsing of such a meatwall by the remote authority of VAR, encapsulating as it does the modern Premier League: a muscular, choreographed and unattractive event robbed even of spontaneity by some distant, corporate ruler that nobody wants and yet is told they must have for their own betterment.
To state it plainly: the VAR operator Darren England made the correct decision in disallowing West Ham’s late equaliser, as Pablo clearly grabs David Raya’s arm as the Arsenal goalkeeper leaped to claim the ball. That it took them so long to make the call said more about the stakes of the call rather than its difficulty.
And so justice, in the narrow and limited purview of VAR, was done, and Arsenal will almost certainly now go on to win the Premier League. It is also a fitting denouement of the dull and forlorn season we have witnessed to this point: Premier League Years 25/26 may be directed by Lars von Trier.
Arsenal were the chief inaugurators of the meatwall, so there is a bitter irony that they have been the ones to benefit from its sudden and haphazard officiating. Not that Arsenal are its sole practitioners, of course: everyone is doing it nowadays. Liverpool, having whinged about it in the opening weeks of the season, jumped aboard midway through and its the chief reason they are going to stumble into next season’s Champions League.
West Ham are furious, of course, but their complaint is less with the decision than its context. Why have we allowed mass fouling to go on at corners without punishment all season, and yet now you deny us a goal that might help us avoid relegation?
That the VAR operator for this moment was literally named England is perhaps a little too on the nose, for it is the Premier League’s light-touch regulation on corners and set pieces that has allowed the game to devolve to these mass scrums. This has all emerged from the Premier League’s unique response to VAR: conscious that video replay interventions were interrupting and slowing down its product, the Premier League decided they needed to speed up the game where they could, and so arrived the mantra of “let it flow”, lately rebranded as a “high bar” for VAR intervention. In practice, this meant ignoring a series of fouls in the name of the spectacle.
The reality, of course, has greatly diminished the spectacle, and we have seen this play out at set pieces, where goalkeepers have lost their status as a protected species. While fouls as clear as Pablo’s on David Raya have generally – though not always – been spotted on VAR, other sides crowd and bump the goalkeeper in more subtle ways that have not been penalised but have nonetheless affected said goalkeeper’s to use his penalty-box advantage to clear the ball to safety.
And with the referees turning a blind eye to all of this grappling and bumping and pushing and pulling, teams have been incentivised to design elaborate set-piece moves to take advantage of this new-found freedom. Just as the greatest minds of a whole generation of American university students have been paid to move to Silicon Valley and use their talents to persuade social media users to click on an ad, the best-paid coaches and managers in world football have been brought to England to choreograph a series of fouls at set pieces.
This has incentivised teams to focus on set pieces like never before, which has led to a drop in ball-in-play time, while it’s not the case that set piece goals are merely an addition and thus increased the number of goals we are seeing per game: they have come at the expense of goals scored from open play.
The knowledge that a team can score relatively easily from a set piece also means they can take fewer risks in possession: one of the reasons Arsenal are so defensively strong is that their settled possession play is very slow and structured, designed with a great emphasis on avoiding an opposition counter attack. Such has been their set piece prowess, they know they can get away with taking far fewer risks in possession: they are the anti Trent Alexander-Arnold. And Arsenal are far from alone, as virtually all the top sides aside from perhaps Manchester United have got involved to some degree this season.
In a league like this, it’s little surprise that Alexander-Arnold himself has left for Spain, joining the ranks of fleeing talent or never-arrived-in-the-first-place talent. Jude Bellingham went straight from Dortmund to Real Madrid, while Harry Kane left for Bayern Munich. Kylian Mbappe never took his talents to England, while Khvicha Kvaratskhelia picked Paris over the Premier League. With Kevin de Bruyne and Mohamed Salah ageing out of English football, who are the franchise attacking players you’d plaster on the poster for next season’s Premier League? After Bruno Fernandes and Erling Haaland, you have…Florian Wirtz? Bukayo Saka? Declan Rice? Nicolas Jover?
The Premier League has become the coach’s league, rather than the natural destination point for the game’s star players.
Which, when you consider how much money is sloshing around the competition, is a perversely impressive achievement.
Perhaps the sheer amount of attention on yesterday’s incident at West Ham will prompt a rethink from the Premier League and its officials, and a move to start refereeing corners and free-kicks in the same manner as Uefa’s fleet of Helen Lovejoys do in the Champions League. That they do so is an existential matter for the league’s spectacle.
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Arsenal In focus Premier League West Ham