Throw-Ins, Elbows, and Dark Arts: From Stoke City to Arsenal, The Top 5 Set-Piece Terrorists Ranked

Let me set the scene for you.

It's November 2008. You're the goalkeeper for Hull City. You've got the ball at your feet, no passing options, and the easiest thing in the world to do is roll it out for a throw-in. Textbook. Safe. Correct football.

Except you're playing Stoke City. And somewhere on the touchline, Rory Delap( Liam Delap's Father) is drying his hands with a towel and doing some light shoulder stretches. So instead of doing the sensible thing, you boot it out for a corner kick. From inside your own half. Because the throw-in felt more dangerous.

That actually happened. And it is, without question, the single greatest tribute ever paid to a set piece.

Welcome to the dark arts. Some teams didn't just use set pieces, they built their entire identity around them. These are those teams. Ranked. No mercy.

Big Sam doesn't get nearly enough credit for being ahead of his time. While everyone else was copying what they saw on Match of the Day, Allardyce was in his office with spreadsheets figuring out where goals actually came from. His answer: set pieces. A lot of them.

Bolton used quick throw-ins to catch teams sleeping, cleverly worked free-kick routines, and data analysis to study their marginal gains, things that caught opposition teams completely off guard. He even had Nicolas Anelka and Jay-Jay Okocha on the team, but the system was built around chaos from corners, not pretty football.

The man himself later said he believed more than 30 per cent of Premier League goals came from set plays. He figured that out around 2003. Everyone else figured it out about fifteen years later. Allardyce was so jealous of Rory Delap's long throw that he described it as "the best Scud missile I have ever seen," with a heavy hint of jealousy in his voice. Which is both alarming praise and a completely normal thing to say about a throw-in. Bolton qualified for Europe twice on a budget. With set pieces. Iconic.

Here's the thing about Dyche. His Burnley teams were not supposed to compete. They had one of the smallest budgets in the league, a stadium that holds fewer people than some supermarkets, and a playing style that made tiki-taka fans physically unwell. And yet he kept Burnley up for years through stubbornness, organisation, and corners that landed exactly where they were supposed to.

The squad was built for it. Ben Mee, James Tarkowski, and Chris Wood all thrived in Dyche's set-piece-based system. In the 2018/19 season, Burnley were the joint-second highest scorers from set pieces with 16 of their 45 goals, which works out at 35.6 per cent of everything they scored.

Dyche would probably describe his approach as "hard work and organisation," which is the footballing equivalent of saying a great chef's secret is "chopping things and heat." Technically true. Wildly underselling the craft. Thomas Frank openly said he looked into what Dyche did at Burnley and tried to bring some of those elements to Brentford. The man was running a masterclass nobody was charging for.

• Brentford are the smartest club in England that nobody wants to admit is the smartest club in England. While everyone was spending fortunes on wingers who could dribble nicely, Frank was hiring specialist set-piece coaches and building a system where a throw-in was genuinely as dangerous as a cross.

  The Bees relied on their set-piece brilliance in the early stages of their promotion run in 2021, using Ivan Toney as the main attacking outlet to either find the net or drag defenders out of position so someone else could, finishing in the top four for set-piece goals multiple seasons in a row.

  When their set-piece coach Jover left for Arsenal, Chelsea then stole Brentford's next set-piece coach, Bernardo Cueva. At that point, clubs weren't defending Brentford's corners anymore, they were just trying to kidnap the people who designed them. The highest compliment in football is when rivals try to steal your staff. Brentford got that compliment twice.

  This season, Brentford have launched the most long throws in the Premier League, becoming the first side to reach 100 for a single campaign. They have directly scored more goals from throw-ins in recent seasons than any other Premier League club. The legacy lives on even after Frank left for Spurs.

The original terrorists. The founding fathers. The people who made Arsène Wenger, the most principled man in football, try to get a rule changed. Think about that. The man who spent 22 years insisting football should be beautiful tried to outlaw a throw-in because Stoke were too good at it.

Here's the timeline. Stoke get promoted in 2008. Everyone expects them to go straight back down. One bookmaker paid out early on bets they'd be relegated. Then Rory Delap, a midfielder, a former county-level javelin champion, a man with arms like industrial machinery, starts launching the ball from the touchline. His throws often ranged 30 to 40 metres, averaging 38 metres, and could reach speeds of 60 kilometres an hour. Pulis then instructed the groundstaff to narrow the Britannia Stadium pitch as much as Premier League regulations allowed, to make the throws shorter, flatter, and more dangerous.

Between 2008 and 2013, Stoke scored 43.1 per cent of their Premier League goals from set pieces. Nearly every other goal came from Delap picking up a ball, drying it with a towel, and throwing it into a box full of very large men. His throws directly led to 24 goals in just the 2008/09 and 2009/10 seasons alone.

Wenger tried to get the throw-in law changed. He tried to prevent Delap from having a towel to dry the ball. All sorts. Stoke's players loved it. The Hull goalkeeper punting the ball out for a corner rather than give Delap a throw is one of the funniest moments in Premier League history and the finest tribute any goalkeeper has ever paid to a dead-ball specialist.

Nobody saw this coming. In the season before Nicolas Jover arrived at Arsenal in 2021, the Gunners scored just six set-piece goals. Six. In a full season. That was not special. That was not even average. That was a team treating corners like a minor inconvenience before getting the ball back.

Then Jover walked in, and Arsenal became a different species.

In the 2023/24 season, Arsenal scored 16 goals from corners alone, matching the all-time Premier League record, while topping the league charts for set-piece goals with 20 and shots from set-pieces with 202. They then matched that corners record again this season, and with nine games remaining, need just one more corner goal to become the outright record holders for a single campaign. Since 2023/24, Arsenal have scored 33 goals from corners. No other Premier League side has more than 20.

Jamie Carragher, a Liverpool man, said on television that every time Arsenal get a corner, his head is in his hands. He said he has never seen anything like it in football, and that the whole world feels a goal is coming. These are people paid to be cynical, and they have essentially given up.

The system is a genuine piece of tactical genius. One of Jover's former players said Jover wasn't satisfied with getting the ball into a five-metre zone. He wanted it landing on a cone. Every time. "He wanted perfection." Jover reportedly has a bonus clause written into his contract, earning extra payment every time Arsenal score from a set piece. The man is literally getting paid per corner goal. Per. Corner. Goal.

Arteta was asked about comparisons to Pulis's Stoke, widely considered the most agricultural set-piece team in Premier League history. He took it as a compliment. "We want to be kings of everything," he said. "At set-pieces, the best in the world."

Arsène Wenger tried to change the rules to stop Rory Delap. Now his own club has become the team every manager is desperately trying to figure out how to stop. The wheel turns.

Arsenal top the Premier League. They lead all of Europe in set-piece goals since 2023. They have a dedicated throw-in coach, a set-piece coach who earns bonuses per goal, and routines that get updated weekly. They are the Stoke City of their generation, except with William Saliba, Bukayo Saka, and a genuine shot at the title.

Tony Pulis would be furious. He would also be slightly proud.

And here is where we leave you with the funniest thing in English football right now.

Arsenal fans spent fifteen years being told their club was too soft. Too pretty. Too in love with the ball to actually win anything. Where is the nastiness? Where is the ruthlessness? Where are the big men arriving late at the back post?

Well. Here they are.

The same club that gave the world Thierry Henry gliding past four defenders is now the most feared set-piece team on the planet. They went from "too beautiful to win" to "not even playing football anymore" in about four years. Both criticisms came from the same people. You cannot complain that a club only knows how to play pretty football and then complain when they fix it. Pick a lane.

Arsenal just got ruthless. They hired someone who treats a corner kick the way a surgeon treats an operation and stopped being polite about it. And now set-piece goals across the entire Premier League have hit a record high, 27.8 per cent of all goals this season, up from a 21.7 per cent average over the last decade.

The dark arts are no longer dark. They are just arts.