Sorry, nope, long-ball isn't boring

There is no such thing as an inherently boring style of play

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Burnley keeping it below par

Adam Bate, who has long been a workhorse for Sky Sports on interest analytics articles, has one out on Burnley.

Before I unpack the crux of Bate’s article, let me take you briefly through the attractive logic of long-ball football, especially for less affluent clubs.

The idea is this: you don’t win football matches unless you score goals, and you don’t score goals without generating high-quality chances.

For some teams, generating high-quality chances is a matter of patience, build-up play, finding an opening, and working your ass off to press teams in their own half to win back possession as quickly as you can. This approach also works beautifully defensively, because the longer you have the ball, the less time they do, and that means potentially fewer chances to score (although in practice it doesn’t always work this way).

But to do all that, you need players with the technical ability to hold possession for long stretches and make incisive passes at the right moment. They don’t come cheap.

If you have, say, middle of the road replacement level Premier League players, you have the option of going the long-ball route. Push up, go narrow, hoof it to tall, imposing forwards as quickly as possible for a knockdown or drawing a foul from a set-piece and hope for the best. Do it enough and you’ll nick a few, even with the difficulty in completing long, raking passes from the back.

This is, as Bate lays out, Burnley’s strategy under Sean Dyche:

Delve deeper and the style contrast becomes even more apparent. When it comes to pass sequences of 10 or more - the bread and butter of most teams' build-up play - Burnley are bottom, having strung that many passes together only 20 times. All but two teams have more than double that. Five teams have already brought up a century of such sequences.

The Clarets were the last team to muster a shot from one of these passages of play, and have still only done it twice. But it is simply not how Dyche wants them to be fashioning their openings. The advanced metrics reveal that Burnley have the least width per sequence of any team but they progress quicker up the field than all but one team from their sequences.

Sean Dyche offers perhaps the perfect metaphor to explain it: golf.

"If you can get it from here to the hole in less shots than everyone else, that's what it's all about," he argued. "The idea of football is to try to win. You work backwards from winning. But win you must. You have to do what you do to win."

But how does long-ball help Burnley defensively? The answer here is slightly more complicated and gets us into uncomfortable questions of style.

The king of what? The king of styyyyylllle…

Style in football is king because you can win football matches with more than one type of style, despite what some angry nerds might think. But what style is truly effective in football is relative to the flavour of the day. As we discovered in the naughts, in the land of 4-5-1, the 4-3-3 is king, or whatever the case may be. And Burnley might be proving right now that for poor teams, in the land of possession football, long-ball is…well, not king, but functional and effective and more than enough for a comfortable mid-table finish.

But what determines the style du jour in leagues like the Premier League?

Well, today, it seems to be avoiding boring football. Or at least, the appearance of being boring. Because, sorry to say, LONG-BALL FOOTBALL IS NOT BORING. Sloppy? Lacking technical refinement? Maybe baby, but boring it is not, at least not per se. So yes, long-ball football can be boring, but in football, nearly anything can be boring.

At one point or another, pundits have claimed the following things are boring:

• lots of the ball going out of play

• lots of passing

• nil-nil score lines

• huge one-sided blowouts

• Going up 2-0 in the first half

• overhyped big matchups

• contests between two lower table sides

• good defences

• bad defences (takes away from the quality of goals)

In fact, most of the time, the things we don’t find boring football are not ideal for most teams! Close scorelines! Quick back-and-forth transitions in attack! A thrilling last-minute goal that takes all three points!

All of this is to say that picking a particularly ‘style’ to avoid appearing boring is a fool’s errand. I would even venture to say that our entire, decades-long obsession with fútbol del arte vs fútbol del resultados is a red herring, a blind alley, a waste of time.

However, in the Premier League’s effort to not be boring, they’ve given Dyche’s Burnley an advantageous opening, particularly in defence. As Bate points out, with most clubs relying on trying to press in the final third to generate scoring chances, Burnley simply passes over it. They don’t hold onto the ball in their end, they send it long pretty much at every opportunity. That’s it.

This strategy arguably wouldn’t work as well in a league with more long-ball clubs, because if you’re constantly pushing up to receive long passes, you’re potentially more vulnerable on the break.

It pays to zag

Despite the clickbait title, the point here is not that long-ball isn’t better, or even that it’s effective. The point is that it pays to pay close attention to the style of the day and try to exploit it. For club for whom there is no ‘optimal style’ save for winning, there is much to be gained by going against the grain and ignoring the blathering romanticists.