Premier League sides scored 29.3% of their goals from set pieces in 2025-26, the third-highest share in the competition’s history. The long-run baseline has been closer to 20%. The jump is real, and the corner stream is doing the lifting.
What we measured
We pulled Opta’s published Premier League set-piece breakdowns for the past six completed seasons, cross-checked against each season’s Wikipedia totals. The data covers corners and indirect free kicks. Penalties, direct free kicks, and throw-ins are tracked separately or excluded. Total goals per season came from the corresponding Wikipedia season pages.
For La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1, no equivalent public aggregate exists. We could not find a single source that publishes set-piece goal share for those leagues across the same window. We say so explicitly in the limitations section rather than estimate around the gap.
The data
Premier League set-piece goals per season
| Season | Set-piece goals (corners + iFK) | Total goals | Set-piece share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | ~210 | 1,034 | ~20% |
| 2020-21 | ~225 | 1,024 | ~22% |
| 2021-22 | ~235 | 1,071 | ~22% |
| 2022-23 | ~240 | 1,084 | ~22% |
| 2023-24 | ~228 | 1,246 | 18.3% |
| 2024-25 | ~165 | 1,115 | ~15% |
| 2025-26 | ~281 | n/a | 29.3% |
Sources: Opta via TheAnalyst (May 2026) for the 29.3% 2025-26 figure. Opta via TheAnalyst (Feb 2025) for the 18.3% 2023-24 figure. Earlier seasons are derived from the long-run corner share baseline of ~13% of goals, plus the long-run indirect FK share of ~5%, totalling ~18-22% across the past decade. Pre-2023-24 figures should be read as the long-run baseline, not as Opta-stated year-on-year numbers.
Corner conversion rate by era
| Era | Corner conversion rate | Avg corner goals per PL season |
|---|---|---|
| 2003-04 to 2009-10 | 2.7% | ~126 |
| 2010-11 to 2016-17 | 3.3% | ~138 |
| 2017-18 to 2023-24 | 3.7% | ~146.8 |
| 2024-25 | 3.3% (slight dip) | ~128 (tracking) |
Source: Opta via TheAnalyst (Feb 2025).
Indirect free kicks have collapsed
| Season | Indirect FK share of all PL goals |
|---|---|
| 2010-11 | 9.3% |
| 2023-24 | 4.6% |
Source: Opta via TheAnalyst (Feb 2025).
What the table shows
Corner conversion has crept up across two decades
Across the past two decades, the share of corners that produced a goal climbed from 2.7% in the early Premier League era, to 3.3% in the 2010s, to 3.7% in the seven seasons before 2024-25. That is a 37% improvement in conversion rate over twenty years, on a base of roughly 4,500 corners per season. The cumulative effect is the difference between 121 corner goals and 167 corner goals in a typical PL campaign.
The reading is straightforward. Premier League sides have invested in set-piece coaching as a specialist discipline. Arsenal’s Nicolas Jover is the most-cited example. The trend predates him but accelerated through the 2020s. Better delivery, better runs, better bpublishing, and better finishing have all pushed the rate up.
Set-piece goals are now mostly corner goals
Indirect free-kick share has collapsed from 9.3% of all PL goals in 2010-11 to 4.6% in 2023-24. Today’s set-piece revolution is overwhelmingly a corner revolution. Direct free kicks remain rare. Penalties sit at roughly 9-11% of goals in most seasons, broadly stable.
The implication for analysis is direct. The variance in set-piece goal share now lives almost entirely in the corner stream. A model.s set-piece analysis is, in practice, a corner analysis.
2023-24 was an anomaly, not a trend
The Premier League’s 2023-24 set-piece share of 18.3% looks like a decline from the long-run ~20-22% baseline. It is not. The total goals figure that season was a record 1,246, the highest in PL history. The new IFAB stoppage-time directive inflated added time, which inflated late goals, which inflated the denominator. Set-piece goal counts held roughly steady. The share fell because the total exploded.
2025-26 reversed the picture. Set-piece goals jumped to roughly 281, with the share climbing to 29.3%, the third-highest in PL history. The cleaner read is that set-piece goals per game have crept up while total goals per game have fluctuated, leaving the share volatile.
Arsenal as the public face of the trend
Arsenal have been the most-cited example of the set-piece revolution. They scored 17 corner goals in 2025-26, a single-season PL record, surpassing West Brom’s 16 from 2016-17. Their share of non-penalty goals from set pieces in 2025-26 was 35.9%, the highest by any PL champion in history.
The club-level story is real, but the underlying pattern is league-wide. Set-piece coaching has spread from the early adopters (Brentford under Thomas Frank, Arsenal under Jover) to the rest of the league. The 0.74 set-piece goals per game in 2025-26 is the third-highest single-season rate on record.
The cross-league gap we could not close
The headline that is most often attached to the set-piece revolution, that the Premier League leads the Big Five in set-piece dependency, is not verifiable from public data. We could not find a published aggregate of set-piece goal share for La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, or Ligue 1 across the same window.
The narrative claim that the PL leads is plausible. The Athletic, Tifo, and The Coaches’ Voice have all written the story. But the league-level numbers behind that claim are not in the public domain. The only honest read is that the Premier League’s set-piece share is climbing fast and the rest of the Big Five’s is unknown.
What we tried that didn’t work
We first treated set-piece goals as a fixed share of total goals, a constant around 20% across all leagues and seasons. That systematically under-predicted set-piece scoring in the 2025-26 Premier League and probably in similar specialist-coaching environments elsewhere. It also missed the structural shift from indirect free kicks to corners.
We then built a per-league, per-season estimate based on published corner conversion rates. That was closer for the Premier League but speculative for the other four leagues, where we had no published aggregate.
What we arrived at is a corner-specific model. The set-piece adjustment is decomposed into a corner conversion rate, applied per league and per recent season, with a fallback to the long-run baseline where data is thin. Indirect free kicks are modelled separately and continue to fade. Penalties and direct free kicks stay close to their long-run shares.
Known limitations
The set-piece share table for the Premier League before 2023-24 is derived from the published long-run corner and indirect FK baselines, not from Opta-stated year-on-year numbers. The 2023-24 and 2025-26 figures are explicitly stated by Opta. The intermediate seasons are estimates.
The cross-league gap is the largest limitation. Any claim about La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, or Ligue 1 set-piece share over the past six seasons is unsupported by public data. The “PL leads the Big Five” narrative claim cannot be verified from public sources.
Set-piece goal definitions vary. Opta counts corners and indirect free kicks within roughly 10 seconds. Other sources include penalties or direct free kicks. Cross-source comparison needs to be read against the definition.
The 2023-24 season was structurally unusual. The new IFAB stoppage-time directive inflated total goals and depressed the set-piece share. The 2023-24 figure of 18.3% should be read against the inflated denominator, not as evidence of a declining trend.
What this means for an analysis
A pre-game analysis that treats set-piece goals as a fixed share of total goals is wrong in two directions. It under-predicts set-piece scoring in leagues and seasons with active set-piece coaching. It over-predicts indirect free-kick scoring across the board.
The right read is a corner-specific adjustment. Corners are now the dominant set-piece stream. Corner conversion rate has crept up across the Premier League decade-by-decade. The trend is structural, not cyclical. An analysis that anchors set-piece expectations to the long-run 20% baseline misses the upward pressure on the corner stream and the downward pressure on the indirect free-kick stream.
For a reader following coverage across leagues, the set-piece adjustment is one of the cleanest examples of why league-specific calibration matters. The model treats the Premier League and Serie A as different competitions because the underlying goal distributions are different, and the set-piece stream is part of that difference.
A read is a lens for separating signal from noise. The set-piece trend is signal, not noise. Corners now decide a meaningful share of Premier League matches, and the share is still climbing.