A goalkeeper places the ball down for a goal-kick. Ahead of him, the opposition are waiting.
The striker blocks one passing lane. A winger positions himself to jump towards the full-back. Midfielders stand ready behind them, hoping the first pass will give the signal for the entire team to move forward.
A few years ago, the obvious response was often to accept the challenge: play short, invite the press and try to pass through it.
Increasingly in the 2025/26 Premier League, teams chose another option.
They kicked over it.
That change helps explain one of the season’s more interesting tactical contradictions. Passing volumes fell, longer distribution remained elevated and early-season high turnovers dropped sharply. Premier League football became more direct in 2025/26. It would be easy to conclude that pressing had become less important.
The opposite interpretation may be more useful.
Pressing has become influential enough to change what opponents are willing to do with the ball.
The Premier League is completing fewer passes
Start with the broadest change.
Premier League teams completed approximately 721 passes per match across the finished 2025/26 season, according to Opta Analyst. That followed 748 completed passes per match in 2024/25 and 780 in 2023/24. Opta Analyst
So the decline happened twice.
Figure 1 places that movement within a longer period. Premier League passing volume had climbed from 696 completed passes per match in 2016/17 towards a recent peak of 780 in 2023/24. It then moved sharply in the other direction.
Figure 1 — Premier League completed passes per match, 2016/17–2025/26 (Sources: premierleague.com and theanalyst.com)
The 2025/26 number also matters because it survived a full season.
Early tactical trends can disappear quickly. A few unusual fixtures, new managers or promoted clubs can distort league-wide averages before enough matches have been played.
That explanation became harder to rely upon once all 380 fixtures were complete.
The league really did complete fewer passes.
But fewer passes do not tell us why.
Teams could simply have become worse at keeping possession. Match state could have changed. Different clubs entering the division could have altered the league average. Managerial turnover could have produced a temporary stylistic shift.
To understand what was happening, we need to look at where those missing short passes went.
The ball increasingly went over the first line
After 210 matches of the season, Premier League teams were playing 99.6 long balls per match, according to Opta Analyst. Their definition classifies a long ball as a pass travelling at least 32 metres.
That compared with 93.4 per match in 2024/25. Opta Analyst
The difference was not enormous, and 2025/26 was not some unprecedented long-ball season. In fact, the rate remained below the 101.3 long balls per match recorded in 2023/24.
That qualification is important.
The story is not that the Premier League suddenly rediscovered long-ball football. It is that direct distribution regained tactical importance at the same time passing volume was falling.
Other measures pointed in the same direction.
After 210 matches, sequences averaged just 9.5 seconds, while eleven of the 17 returning clubs had initially reduced their passes per sequence and eleven had increased their direct speed. Opta Analyst
There was movement towards quicker progression, but not a uniform revolution.
Not every team became more direct.
Enough did to change the league-wide pattern.
Goal-kicks make the change harder to dismiss
Perhaps the clearest clue comes from the most controlled possession a football team can have.
A goal-kick begins with the ball stationary and the team in possession able to choose its structure. There is no loose ball to blame, no hurried clearance and no transition forcing the goalkeeper into an instinctive decision.
It is planned.
During 2025/26, 48.8 per cent of Premier League goal-kicks ended in the opposition half after 210 matches, compared with roughly 40 per cent the previous season. Opta Analyst
That is a substantial tactical choice.
Rather than automatically starting an attack with the goalkeeper, centre-backs and holding midfielder circulating the ball close to their own penalty area, teams increasingly accepted that the first useful possession might begin much further forward.
The question then changes.
Instead of asking, “Can we play through the press?”, teams can ask, “Why play through it at all?”
If an opponent has committed several players high up the pitch, a longer pass can remove those players from the immediate phase.
Of course, kicking long does not guarantee possession.
That is where the modern version of direct football becomes more interesting.
A long pass can be the start of a possession, not the end of one
There is a tendency to treat short passing as organised and long passing as speculative.
That distinction is increasingly unhelpful.
A long pass can be highly structured.
The goalkeeper or centre-back targets a forward, a channel or the space behind an aggressive defensive line. Midfielders position themselves around the expected landing zone. Wide players prepare for the ball to spill towards the touchline. The team may not expect to win the first aerial duel cleanly at all.
Sometimes the real target is the second ball.
That creates a different route towards the same objective: controlled possession in a useful area.
Instead of completing six short passes to reach midfield, a team might play one 40-metre pass and attempt to establish possession there through the duel that follows.
The statistical limitation is that we cannot currently establish, league-wide, how valuable those possessions became. Reliable second-ball outcomes and the attacking value of long-versus-short build-up sequences would require proprietary event-chain data.
So we should not claim that longer build-up was more effective.
We can say something narrower and better supported: Premier League teams increasingly chose it.
Liverpool show what the press can change without winning the ball
Liverpool provide the clearest case study.
Across their opening nine league games, they faced 571 long passes — the highest total in the Premier League. Premier League
That statistic becomes more revealing when considered alongside pressing opportunities.
A pressing team can only win the ball high if the opponent gives it something to press.
If a goalkeeper plays short to a centre-back, the defending side can jump. The striker presses from one angle, the winger closes the next pass and midfielders squeeze the available space behind them.
If the goalkeeper instead sends the ball beyond that entire group, the pressing sequence never happens.
The press has still affected the attack.
It has simply done so before anyone records a turnover.
That is one of the most important lessons from the season.
Traditional pressing statistics are mostly outcome statistics. They tell us when pressure eventually produces a regain.
They cannot fully capture the possessions an opponent abandoned because the threat of pressure changed the decision in advance.
Liverpool’s experience therefore offers a useful way to think about pressing differently.
Sometimes a successful press does not end with winning the ball near goal.
Sometimes it ends with the opposition refusing to play there in the first place.
Then pressing started to fight back
This is where the season becomes more complicated.
If we stopped after the early months, the argument might be simple: teams played longer, high turnovers collapsed and aggressive pressing was being bypassed.
But Premier League tactics rarely stand still for that long.
After the opening 50 matches of 2025/26, teams averaged 11.5 high turnovers per match, down considerably from 14.6 in 2024/25 and 16.7 in 2023/24. A high turnover is an open-play possession won within 40 metres of the opposition goal. Premier League
By the 210-match point, that number had recovered to 13.3 per match. Opta Analyst
At the same time, the proportion of high turnovers ending in a shot recovered from 14.9 per cent after 50 matches to 16.1 per cent after 210.
The long-ball rate barely moved.
It was 99.7 per match after 50 matches and 99.6 after 210.
Figure 2 captures the tactical tension.
Figure 2 — Long passes stayed high while pressing opportunities partially recovered (Sources: premierleague.com and theanalyst.com)
The early decline in pressing outcomes was real.
So was the response.
Pressing did not simply fade as opponents became more direct. Teams adapted and began recovering more high turnovers even while longer passing remained common.
That is why “pressing is dead” tells the wrong story.
Pressing and directness are adapting to each other
Football tactics tend to create their own countermeasures.
Possession structures became increasingly sophisticated partly because teams wanted to control matches and manipulate defensive blocks.
Pressing then evolved to disrupt those structures.
Now the response to the press has become more sophisticated too.
Sometimes that means creating better short-passing structures. Sometimes it means drawing the opposition forward before playing around them.
And sometimes it means refusing the contest altogether.
Hit the striker.
Attack the space behind the full-back.
Compete for the second ball.
Force the pressing team to turn and run towards its own goal rather than allowing it to attack forward onto predictable short passes.
Then the cycle begins again.
Pressing sides can adjust their positioning for longer distribution. Midfields can become better organised around second balls. Defensive lines can change their starting positions. Teams can press the receiving zone rather than only the initial build-up.
The recovery in high turnovers during 2025/26 suggests some of that adaptation was already happening.
This was not the death of playing out from the back
There are several reasons to be cautious.
The Premier League’s club composition changed. Managerial turnover may have altered individual playing styles. Match state inevitably influences passing behaviour, while part of the fall in passing could represent regression from the unusually high 780 completed passes per match in 2023/24.
Long-ball frequency was also not at a record level.
And there is no evidence that every Premier League side abandoned short build-up; some teams continued to build patiently from deep.
Most importantly, the rebound in high turnovers shows that the season itself contained more than one tactical phase.
The first response to aggressive pressing may have been to bypass it more often.
The next response was for pressing teams to find new ways of creating pressure.
Those processes can coexist.
In fact, they probably have to; possession alone does not determine success.
The next tactical battle may happen before the first pass
Pressing is usually discussed in terms of intensity.
How high does a team defend? How quickly does it close down? How many turnovers does it create?
The 2025/26 season suggests another question deserves more attention:
What does the press persuade the opponent to do?
Premier League passing volume fell for the second year in succession. Long distribution remained elevated. Almost half of goal-kicks were reaching the opposition half by the 210-match point. Liverpool encountered more early long passes than any other side.
None of that means possession football disappeared.
It means possession became more conditional.
Teams continued to play short when they believed they could manipulate the pressure. When the risk became too high, they increasingly found another route.
And the pressing teams responded.
That is not tactical extinction. It is a tactical arms race.
The most revealing thing about Premier League pressing in 2025/26 may therefore be something the turnover statistics cannot show on their own.
Its influence was visible in the passes opponents decided not to make.
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JC
Sources for the data presented are referenced appropriately within the article.
Main image is based on an image by Franco Monsalvo on Pexels