It's called a long throw, and here's what it's for, so

Back in April 2024, when I optimistically thought Daniel Farke was taking Leeds United back into the Premier League with his first try, I was worrying about the future for his style of football. I'd just watched Carlo Ancelloti's Real Madrid force Pep Guardiola's Manchester City 'into a high level facsimile of Huddersfield Town versus Leeds United this March' — sucking up Pep's preference for "20,000 million passes" and beating the Citizens on penalties. Farke's methods in the Championship were similar to Guardiola's, with the same simple problem of looking boring, and I wondered about him taking them into the Premier League at the exact moment when control, as vogue, was giving way to chaos.

Going out of style

This is not to start arguments about one style being better than another, or one manager being better than another. But what people are finding to be faults in Daniel Farke’s football would have solved many of the problems people had with Marcelo Bielsa’s.

LeedsistaMoxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Things have changed a bit by October 2025 but not the way I thought they would. Now it's Guardiola grinding the low possession results, while instead of embracing open-ended chaos, the Premier League as a whole has adopted a new mode of control, restricting the action to bursts of set-pieces. It's the season of in-swinging corners onto heads and long throws into the mixer and, surprisingly, Leeds have been aiming right for the right fashion with their data-led strategies for the new season. Daniel Farke is at the vanguard of fashionable football. Who knew.

Peacocks aside, I'm not sure if these are good trends. The general reaction now long throws are back has been to celebrate tradition, actually old fashioned football the way we all liked it come back at last. But I'm wondering if set-pieces aren't actually a bad answer to what the new football should look like. Rather than turning back to old ways, set-pieces are creating the clips that TikTok virality demands by reducing football action from ninety minutes of sheer hell (copyright John Barnes) to twenty seconds of narrative completion.

The type of football John Barnes used to thrill with, dribbling for fun and depending on Ian Rush to make something of it, has been tried on the bored-teen market and cut through to an extent. Hopefully everyone will always love seeing skills. But a clip that begins midway through a move as a winger gets the ball, and ends maybe even before a cross goes nowhere to nobody, lacks two crucial elements people want from their TikTok videos: context, and a pay-off. It's hard to tell what's happening in some random clip from a random game, and if there isn't a goal at the end of it, what was it all about? You see this a lot in the comments on social media: bored viewers demanding context, to know what happened before the video began, to have some justification of what they've just watched.

A long throw has the perfect arc for short-form video on the internet. It begins at the beginning, a player holding a ball and a towel. There's time for a caption to let you know the teams, the score, the situation. You kinda know how it will end, because the two likeliest endings are a clearance or an incident, and nobody is posting a video of a clearance, so you can expect a goal, a save, or some sort of fight. You know it's going to pay off and that the conclusion is coming soon: this isn't an open-ended free-flowing move beginning on halfway that could take thirty passes to conclude when what you really want is to flick your thumb and see a cat being funny. A throw in? In twenty seconds that will all be over. So you're likely to stick around, to see the middle, to find out how as the ball goes from thrower's hands to six yard box this video becomes something worth seeing.