It can be hard to tell what's happening in the Premier League at any given moment because, well, watching soccer is hard.
There are so many pieces moving around at the same time, the broadcast cameras rarely show you all of them, and it's really difficult to not just stare at the ball. Try to look somewhere else the next time you're watching a game; I bet you can't.
And those are just the issues with figuring out what is happening.
In such a low-scoring sport, a single goal immediately warps everyone's behavior. Think about it this way: The average NFL team scores about 23 points per game; the average Premier League team scores about 1.4 goals per game. So going up by a goal is like going up by 16 points in an NFL game. And when a football team takes that big of a lead, they start playing differently, don't they?
So the explanation for why things are happening on the field immediately changes after the score shifts away from 0-0. And it's hard enough before the score changes, too. It's impossible to know if a given player is doing a specific thing -- or a given group of players are interacting in a specific way -- because of what a coach told them to do, because that's just what they decided to do, because they're reacting to what the other team is doing, or because of some combination of the three.
But over the past year or so, players and coaches have been giving us hints about what's happening in the Premier League and what has changed.
Now, players and coaches have little to no incentive to actually tell us anything truthful about the game they just played -- if anything, they're incentivized to do the opposite. But the party line from all Premier League players and managers has been so consistent that it would have to be a grand conspiracy for it to not be true.
The clearest explanation came from Liverpool's Alexis Mac Allister after he scored twice in a 4-3 win over Villarreal last month. "Now, it's more man-to-man," he said when asked about the difference between the team's tactics under coach Andoni Iraola versus his predecessor, Arne Slot. "You have to communicate less because you have to follow [the opponent].
"Last year it was more of a zonal thing. ... Now it's much easier. You have to think less but run more, maybe. That's the way football is going."
The Premier League has entered its man-to-man marking era: Think less, run more. And at least for now, it's rewired the way the sport works.
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The Premier League's rise of running and fall of thinking
It's not just Mac Allister, of course. His captain, Virgil van Dijk, made similar comments a couple of weeks later.
"It's just a trend now that everyone just goes one-v-one, and then you just have to think about what you're going to do," he said. "Are you going to go direct and play the second ball, or are you going to try to go through them? That's the risk-reward you have to take."
Back in March, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta was asked about his team bleeding the clock while they lined up their set pieces in a low-event win against Brighton, and he quickly directed the focus to another force that was transforming what we watched every weekend.
"Give four seconds for the long throws if you need, but the biggest issue is the man-to-man, believe me," Arteta said. "And then all the managers have to agree. [If you create a new rule that says] you cannot defend man-to-man and tomorrow, you're going to have a different league. I guarantee you, a different league."
Unai Emery, Arteta's predecessor and a fellow Basque Premier League manager, made a similar point earlier in the same season: "Football is becoming man-to-man all over the pitch. With teams playing man-to-man, pressing against their direct opponent, even in a medium block, trying to jump man-to-man, we are seeing a lot more of this than last year."
As ever, Pep Guardiola was ahead of the curve: He was complaining about the difficulty of playing against man-to-man defenses all the way back in January 2025, as Manchester City slumped to their worst season under his watch.
"Before, a team never made man-marking against us," he said. "I remember everyone came here to the Etihad and stayed back. The first team I saw man-marking was Neil Warnock at Cardiff. And after, [Gian Piero] Gasperini with Atalanta. Now everyone does it. Everyone comes here, it doesn't matter: man-to-man."
While "high pressing" and "man-to-man marking" are not exactly the same thing, they are closely connected.
If you're following the man you're marking, then you're often going to follow him into his own defensive third, and if his team is trying to play out of the back, you're going to be there to put him under pressure. And as data from Gradient Sports shows, the number of pressures in the attacking third has increased significantly over the past two seasons:
What's even more stark is the rising amount of pressure applied to passing lanes:
Now, this might seem to suggest a rise in zonal pressure -- where players are tasked with defending a specific area of the field as opposed to a specific opponent -- is more likely than it indicates a slightly different kind of pressure. It would be that pressing player isn't getting in the attacking player's face, but rather orienting his positioning to block a pass to another player.
With a rise in man-to-man marking, we'd also expect to see the ball being contested more often outside of the defensive third.
Teams that are sitting deep will eventually make a play to stop possession, but not until it's absolutely necessary -- they're happy to let their opponents pass the ball around in unthreatening areas. But with a rise in man-to-man marking, there should be a rise in fouls, interceptions, clearances and tackles made outside of the defensive third.
And what do you know, there is:
At the same time, we'd expect there to be some changes to the way teams attack. Goal-scoring isn't down during the rise in man-marking, and that's because it's not a purely defensive strategy. Through 10 matches, there have been 97 shots attempted from sequences (uninterrupted possessions) that started via a defensive action in the attacking third. That's the most in the Stats Perform data set.
However, we're also seeing teams break through the man-to-man press more often. Way more often, in fact:
While we don't have data that explicitly confirms that, yes, man-to-man-marking has taken over the Premier League, enough managers and players are telling us that it has. And there's enough related datapoints -- things that should be happening if man-to-man-marking is happening -- that we no longer need to be skeptical.
Why man-marking? And what comes next?
The rise of man-marking leads to all kinds of other questions. The first of which is, well, why?
This kind of seems like a dumb-guy strategy, doesn't it? You're telling me that just having your players follow the other team's players around is the best way to play defense? In a sport in which we idolize the tactical brilliance of the managers and write 10,000-word breakdowns of a team's treatment of the right half-space, the most effective way to play is to chase your opponent around the field? If that's true, why did everyone just realize it a year or two ago?
To answer myself: The modern history of sports is defined by most of the dumb-guy answers being the right-guy answers. Shooting 3-pointers is better than shooting 2-pointers. Home runs and strikeouts are both cool and really effective. And yes, you're more likely to get a first down if you give yourself four chances instead of three. So this would just be the latest example of the obvious strategy being ignored despite it also being the best strategy.
But I don't think that's exactly what's happening here. Instead, my theory goes back to what everything goes back to: the rising -- and leveling -- financial power of the Premier League.
Per the site Transfermarkt, the combined estimated transfer values of all Premier League players is currently €14.11 billion. The next highest league is LaLiga at ... €6.12 billion. But most of the growth -- the reason why the Premier League has sped past everyone else -- is happening beyond the biggest teams.
There are six Premier League clubs (the "Big Six") among Transfermarkt's 10 most valuable rosters, but Real Madrid, Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich remain right there with them. That's nothing new, though.
What is new is that there are six more Premier League teams in the top 10. Brentford -- who were playing in the Championship at the beginning of the decade and have never finished higher than ninth in the Premier League -- would have the fourth-most-valuable squad in Spain and the second-most-valuable squad in France, Germany and Italy.
So, if defending deep is the classic underdog strategy -- take no risks out of possession, gum up the space around your goal, and then hope to counterattack into the space your opponent concedes a couple times -- it makes sense that fewer teams are employing that strategy as their relative talent level has rapidly improved.
As The Analyst pointed out back in October, last year was the first Premier League season since 2005-06 when teams that had 55% of the ball or more won fewer games than teams that had 45% of the ball or less.
Through 10 matchdays this season, the team with more possession has 34 wins, while the team with less possession has 39. The era where the better team dominates the ball and wins more often than not -- the one we've grown accustomed to watching -- is over.
In the past, smaller Premier League clubs had to choose between players who were skilled on the ball but not athletic, or vice versa. So you had teams that were physically capable of man-to-man marking but useless once they won the ball. Or you had teams who were great with the ball but couldn't get it once they lost it.
So if a smaller club tried to man-mark a big club, it would end up, say, losing 7-0 to Manchester City.
Now, though, Premier League clubs can get themselves players who can do both -- or at least, players who are capable of chasing you around the field for 90 minutes and good enough to punish you once they steal the ball back.
The proliferation of physical metrics has definitely pushed clubs toward players who can run fast and run often rather than players who produce in possession. And that, no doubt, has driven the man-to-man trend.
All of which, I think, leaves us in a state of interregnum. What I mean is probably best summed up by this graph from Gradient:
Their team of graders looks at each pass played in the Premier League each weekend and awards it somewhere between a minus-2 and a plus-2 -- on a scale from worst-possible execution to best-possible execution. If there's more pressing happening, it shouldn't necessarily mean that passing under pressure gets worse on average. It should just mean that there are more passes made under pressure.
So, the question here is: Why?
There are two potential answers. The first is that the pressing itself is both happening more often and is being done more effectively, thus the declined passing proficiency.
The alternative is that teams have created a vicious cycle in which they've prioritized players who are more athletic than skilled, so the pressers have the advantage over the passers, but then when the pressers win the ball back, the balance immediately flips against them. That combination -- a growing differential between pressing skill and passing skill -- seems like the most likely explanation for such a steep drop in passing grade.
Plus, we know that the Premier League is more physical than all of the other Big Five leagues. It's not just a stereotype; the players run at higher max speeds, they sprint more often, and they sprint for longer distances. Per Gradient, Premier League teams press more often in the final third, too.
How to break through, then? Someone will; the history is soccer isn't just a linear development toward an optimal point of play. No, it's a series of actions and reactions, moving around in a circle. The attack has the upper hand, then the defense. The brute strength and endurance wins out until someone figures out a new way to make sure that the ball moves faster than the man.
The main reaction so far is that Premier League clubs have begun prioritizing dribbling wingers over goal-scoring and goal-creating wingers. The thinking: The easiest way to beat a man-to-man press is to fill your team with players who can beat a man, one-on-one.
I'm skeptical this is the way forward, as it seems to me just another way of doubling down on the physical nature of the league.
Usually, the solutions come from doing something different. Perhaps we'll see the return of the type of player we saw during the previous decade: the wide playmaker. As teams shut off the middle of the field, they shifted their attacking midfielders out wide. This increased the team's capability of keeping the ball by replacing a dribbling winger with a passer, and while it meant less of a threat of beating a fullback off the dribble, it created new angles for great passers to create chances from.
Or maybe we'll see a return of wingers who play on the same side as their dominant foot. This would stretch the field -- forcing the man-markers to cover more ground -- and it would allow for the late runs from midfielders into the box or the kind of underlapping runs that we see from Arsenal's Riccardo Calafiori that are especially difficult for man-marking teams to track.
Or perhaps we'll even see both -- with one type of player on each wing. Whatever the answer is, I do expect there to be some kind of answer. Right now, the Premier League is stuck inside of the pressure of man-marking. Someone will eventually figure out a way to break free.
