Each season in the Premier League, a new tactical innovation comes to take the league by storm. A few clever teams will start the trend and soon enough, every team in the league has a go at trying to emulate the same strategies as those trailblazers.
Two seasons ago the trend was inverted fullbacks. Arsenal and Manchester City in particular began moving defenders into midfield to give themselves four players in the center of the pitch, to outnumber the typical three player midfields used by other teams.
Other teams in the league had a go at pushing a defender into the midfield, with mixed results. Only Chelsea and Arsenal still execute this regularly. Chelsea with defender Malo Gusto and Arsenal with Miles Lewis-Skelly or Jurrien Timber depending on the situation.
Last season was the year of super athletic fullbacks. Fullbacks are the defenders on either side of the back line, who would routinely play the entire length of the pitch on their own, effectively allowing teams to have a fifth player in attack when they were on the ball. Simultaneously, these fullbacks would also track back so fast and relentlessly that teams were not left short in the back, either.
So what will this season’s tactical innovation be?
Defensive midfielders have been given the job of making late runs beyond their fellow midfielders, and even beyond a number of the forwards, to arrive in the box untracked and offer a goal threat. Ryan Gravenberch, Moises Caicedo, Joao Palhinha, Martin Zubimendi, Casemiro, Idrissa Gueye and Ladislav Krejčí have all scored open play goals already this season.
Ryan Gravenberch’s goal in the Merseyside Derby serves as an example. With the ball deep in buildup, Gravenberch knocked the ball forward and got moving. He passed Garner and Gueye in the middle of the pitch, who let him continue his run unmarked until he got to an area where a centerback should be aware of him.
But with centerback Michael Keane preoccupied with tracking the run of Connor Bradley and James Tarkowski marking Hugo Ekitike, there was simply no one to track Gravenberch’s run into the box and he converted a goal off of a smooth cross from winger Mo Salah.
In the same match, Everton midfielder Idrissa Gueye, whom Gravenberch passed during his goal, did the same. As the deepest midfielder, he played a pass out wide and kept his run going. While Liverpool had players who could pick him up, including Gravenberch, he managed to escape marking and ended up in the box, entirely unmarked, and scored.
Ladislav Krejčí for Wolves, in a game against Leeds, scored a nearly identical goal to Ryan Gravenberch. He made an untracked run from deep, received a pass, and scored.
This has been happening across the league all season: nobody bothers to track or mark a defensive midfielder. Teams are starting to use this to their advantage.
The man whose job it is to mark the defensive midfielder is oftentimes the most attacking-minded midfielder, who rarely is going to track back that deeply when there is seemingly no imminent threat.
This may not seem groundbreaking. Runs from deep are hard to track. The real question is, is this actually making a tangible difference to the makeup and the results of the Premier League? According to the numbers, it is.
Last season, there were 271 unique goal scorers in the Premier League, and one must go all the way down to the 57th highest goalscorer, Enzo Fernandez, before finding someone who is not a forward. Even then, he often played as an attacking midfielder.
Sandro Tonali at 78th played half the season as a purported defensive midfielder, Declan Rice behind him at 79th who did the same. But one would have to go down to Carlos Baleba in 119th place with three goals before finding a primarily defensive midfielder on the top scorers list. Players in this position simply were not making much impact in terms of goal scoring.
However, this season Caicedo is in joint fifth with three goals, already tying the most of any pivot last season. Zubimendi in 19th, Palhinha in 27th, Gravenberch in 29th, Casemiro in 53rd and Ladislav Krejčí in 58th. The league has gone from not one primarily defensive midfielder in the top 100 scorers last season to seven so far this season.
It is worth noting that this is a small sample size, as we are only seven games into the season at the time of this article, which is certainly not enough to say with any sort of confidence that anything major has changed in the league. But it is compelling to suggest that the league is on the precipice of something big changing. The fact that the two most prominent defensive midfielders in the Premier League right now, Caicedo and Gravenberch, have already broken all their own personal goalscoring season records for their clubs is not a coincidence.
As the Premier League season continues, keep an eye out for these proper defensive midfielders and their untracked runs into the box, and point them out to whoever you are watching with. Who knows: you may just be ahead of the curve on identifying the next major trend in the Premier League.