Goals From Distance Are Back — But Why?

For years, football analytics told us the same thing: stop shooting from range. Expected goals (xG) models made it clear that efforts from outside the box were largely a waste of possession. Teams listened, and long-range attempts in the Premier League gradually faded away.

In the 2008-09 season, Premier League teams took 45.7% of their shots from outside the box. This season, that figure has dropped to just 32.5% — one of the lowest on record. The average shot distance has also shrunk, from 18.3 metres to just 15.4 metres.

And yet, something strange is happening.

The Numbers Don't Add Up

Despite the historic low in long-range attempts, goals from outside the box are being scored at the same rate as the 19-year average — 0.23 per team, per game. That means when a player does shoot from distance this season, the ball is hitting the net more often than in almost any other year on record.

Cast your mind back to Morgan Rogers of **
Aston Villa picking out top corners with ease early in the season. Or Liverpool's
Dominik
Szoboszlai** bending in efforts that seemed to defy physics.

So what's going on?

A New Ball, A New Theory

Before this season, the Premier League made a major change — it **switched from Nike to
Puma**, using a new brand of match ball for the first time in 25 years. Could the new ball be flying differently, making it easier to strike cleanly and harder for goalkeepers to read?

To find out, sports science journalist Ryan O'Han lon sent match balls to physicist **John Eric
Goff** at the University of
Lynchburg in Virginia — a man who has spent two decades studying how balls move through the air.

Goff and a team of mechanical engineers in Japan then fired the balls through a high-speed wind tunnel, collecting aerodynamic data to model exactly how each ball behaves in flight.

The Science of the Ball

Goff is no stranger to this kind of investigation. He first gained global attention after studying the **
Adidas
Jabulani — the infamous ball used at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, which players like
Gianluigi
Buffon and
Julio
Cesar** publicly criticised for its unpredictable movement.

His research revealed why the
Jabulani behaved so erratically. Two key factors govern how a football travels through the air: speed and the drag coefficient — essentially how much the air disrupts the ball's stability during flight.

Most World Cup balls maintain a low drag coefficient above 35 miles per hour, keeping them stable at pace. The
Jabulani, however, experienced a sudden spike in drag around 55 miles per hour — meaning it became unstable at a speed that players actually kick the ball. The result? Those bizarre, swerving, goalkeeper-deceiving strikes that defined South Africa 2010.

What About the New Puma Ball?

Goff applied the same wind tunnel methodology to both the previous **Nike
Flight ball and the new
Puma** Premier
League ball, comparing how they behave aerodynamically.

The early findings suggest the balls do perform differently in ways that could meaningfully affect how shots travel — potentially explaining why long-range finishes have become more frequent even as long-range attempts have declined.

For African football fans watching stars like **
Mohamed
Salah** and others lighting up the Premier
League, this is a fascinating reminder that the beautiful game is also a science — and sometimes, the ball itself changes everything.