‘It’s a weapon’ – the rise of the long throw

“The long throw-in is back,” England boss Thomas Tuchel has declared.

For some, it never went away.

Between 2008 and 2012, Stoke City’s Rory Delap regularly hurled the ball into the penalty area from the sidelines, filling defences with dread.

“You cannot say it is football any more. It is more rugby on the goalkeepers than football,” then Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said at the time.

Delap and Stoke posed such danger during that spell that Hull goalkeeper Boaz Myhill once kicked the ball out for a corner to avoid a throw-in.

Now utilising the long throw as an attacking resource is becoming more prominent in English football.

According to Opta, on the opening weekend of the new Premier League season 11 out of 20 teams sent a long throw into the opposition’s penalty area on at least one occasion – up from just four in the same period last season.

“Throw-ins are underestimated – by coaches, players, commentators, fans – as something you should just do and see what happens,” said Thomas Gronnemark, who was appointed Liverpool’s first throw-in coach in 2018 and worked with the club until 2023.

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp had not even heard of a throw-in coach when the Dane, who holds the world record for the longest throw-in at 51.33m, joined the club’s backroom staff.

But the Reds’ possession stats from throw-ins improved from 45.4% to 68.4% under Gronnemark’s tutorship, moving from 18th to first in the league on that metric.

Premier League clubs are trying to harness the power of the long throw, with throws at of least 20 metres which end in the opposition box increasing from 0.9 per game in 2020-21 to 1.5 in 2024-25.

Meanwhile, long throws that led to goals increased from 0.03% in 2020-21 to 0.38% in 2024-25.

Gronnemark now works with Brentford – so it is no surprise the Bees have excelled in that area. Last season they scored five goals from throw-ins, generating 48 chances with an xG of 7.2.

And now their former manager Thomas Frank – following his summer move to north London – is employing similar tactics with Tottenham.

Tuchel’s assistant Anthony Barry focused his university dissertation on throw-ins in the Premier League.

Barry watched more than 60 hours of footage from the 2018-19 Premier League season and analysed every one of the 16,380 throw-ins.

One of his conclusions was that throwing the ball “laterally or backwards can increase throw-in success rates in comparison to throwing the ball forwards”, and the “higher-ranked teams utilised this strategy more often”.

Tuchel has highlighted the time constraints in his preparations for the World Cup and Gronnemark believes working on throw-ins is a smart approach.

“I told you – the long throw-in is back. But we do not have a lot of time,” said the England head coach.

“But once we arrive at the World Cup all these things matter, so we will also talk about long throw-ins, we will talk about long kicks from the goalkeeper and not only playing short.”

Gronnemark said: “It’s really sensible. If I’m helping national teams it will normally be when they are in the camp before the big tournaments. If Tuchel said ‘we want to improve the long throwing’, that would be really easy for me to improve.