Have Premier League Corners Been Fixed By the Increased Scrutiny on Grappling? Analyst

Premier Leaguereferees have been told to clamp down on holding at corners, and it appears in the numbers as though there has been an immediate impact. Over the last few years, events in the penalty area at the most common attacking set-piece in football had developed into the kind of a brawl you might be more likely to see in the stands than on the pitch.

And it reached a nadir last season when, at just about every corner, seemingly every player would have their hands all over an opponent. Plenty had no intention of bothering to consider or look at where the ball was.

It all got very ugly as set-pieces became a bigger part of Premier League football than they had arguably ever been before, despite the technical ability of the players reaching a new peak. Goals flew in in record numbers; 188 were scored from corners in 2025-26, which is the most in any season since the Premier League's inception.

More goals aren't necessarily a sign of a problem, of course. It's generally regarded as a good thing when more goals are scored because that tends to mean we are getting more entertainment.

But the grappling had got so out of control that corners became too difficult to defend. Blocking and holding became so commonplace, so embedded in the tactics of trying to score from a corner, and so natural for the attacking team, that they became too hard to stop.

There were teams that were picking players for their ability in the box. The increase in goals was actually a negative.

And crucially for those in charge of the game, the throng of bodies in the six-yard box and the fact that just about everyone was grapplingsomebodymade it almost impossible to referee properly. Plenty of that undetected holding directly led to a fair few of those goals going in.

So, this summer, Pro Ref, the rebranded name for PGMOL, the body that oversees match officiating in English football, had a rethink. The decision was made that more focus was needed on penalising "holding actions that have clear material impact".

That is, players being prevented from potentially getting to the ball by an opponent who is holding them. The emphasis was said to be on "non-footballing holding actions that have no place on the football pitch".