Spurs Have Stopped Dribbling. Hull Have Started Mauling. And the Outswinging Corner Is Dead.
Three tactical trends from The Athletic's Premier League Data Notebook — Tottenham's vanishing carry game, Hull City's combative disruption, and the structural decline of the outswinging corner — and what they reveal about how the early 2026-27 season is being shaped.
Spurs Have Stopped Dribbling. Hull Have Started Mauling. And the Outswinging Corner Is Dead.
The early weeks of the 2026-27 Premier League season are usually where narratives are written in pencil, not ink. The Athletic's Premier League Data Notebook, though, points to a few patterns that are already starting to complicate the assumptions managers brought into the campaign. Three trends in particular — Tottenham's vanishing dribbling, Hull City's combative disruption, and the structural decline of the outswinging corner — are worth reading carefully. Each one is less about the noise of small samples and more about how coaches are choosing to construct their attacks and defend against them.
Spurs and the dribbling deficit
For most of the past two seasons, Tottenham's attacking identity in open play has been carried, in large part, by wide players who could carry the ball past their man. According to the Data Notebook, Spurs' dribbling output has fallen sharply compared to last season. The drop is visible not just in the headline numbers but in the location of those dribbles, with fewer take-ons coming from advanced wide areas — the zones where the side's most dangerous moments have historically been built.
The tactical reading here is not that Tottenham's wingers have suddenly forgotten how to dribble. It is more useful to ask what they are doing instead. Two things appear to be happening at once. The first is structural: opponents are sitting in deeper, more compact mid-blocks against Spurs, denying the one-v-one isolation that wide dribblers feed on. The second is personnel: with the wide-forward roles asked to press higher and recover into a back five shape, the energy cost of a 30-yard carry has changed. The data, in other words, is the symptom. The tactical shift is the cause.
That matters for Spurs because their chance creation has, over a multi-year sample, been disproportionately carried by those carries. If the carry volume drops and the alternative mechanisms — cut-backs, second-phase play, set-pieces — do not fully compensate, the side's expected-goals profile in open play will drift down even when the results do not. Tottenham's early points return is, by this reading, partially masking a structural problem in how they are being allowed to attack.
Hull and the mauling game
Hull City's promotion-season identity was direct, physical, and front-footed. In the early top-flight weeks, that profile has hardened rather than softened. The Notebook records Hull winning duels at a remarkable rate, both aerially and on the ground, and doing so in the opponent's half in a way that disrupts opposition build-up before it reaches the middle third.
The interesting tactical question is not whether Hull can keep this up — the Premier League's duel volume is unforgiving over a full season — but what it does to the sides they face. Teams that are used to playing through a press against promoted sides are finding that the duels are being contested in different zones than expected. Hull are not simply defending deep and clearing; they are contesting first contacts in advanced areas, which compresses the time and space available for the opponent's first progressive pass. This is, in tactical terms, a form of chaos pressing — the side does not need to win every duel, only enough of them in dangerous zones to make the opponent's build-up statistically less efficient.
For established Premier League sides, this creates a specific kind of match: one where the expected-goals model might underrate Hull because the disruption happens before the chance. For Hull, the question is whether the physical cost of that style is sustainable over 34 games, or whether the data we are seeing now will be the shape of their entire season.
The outswinging corner and the set-piece evolution
The most quietly significant trend in the Notebook is the broader collapse of the outswinging corner. League-wide, outswinging deliveries are converting at historically low rates. Inswinging corners and short-corner routines are taking their place. The reason, in tactical terms, is well-understood but worth restating: an outswinging corner tends to be headed back across the goalkeeper, where reaction time and positioning make it harder to generate quality chances, and where modern goalkeeping coaching has systematically improved the save percentage. Inswingers, by contrast, head the ball across the keeper's body and into the area where reaction saves are statistically less efficient.
The set-piece shift is not just a numbers quirk. It is a change in the time coaches are willing to invest. A short-corner routine, by definition, requires a sequence: a lay-off, a one-two, a delayed cross. The outswinging corner was a one-action solution; the inswinger or the short corner is a multi-action problem that asks the defending side to defend for longer and across more zones. As set-piece analysts have argued for years, the value of a corner is not just the delivery but the total time the opposition is asked to defend. By that measure, the shift away from outswingers is, in tactical terms, a shift toward more punishing set-pieces, even when the raw conversion rate looks similar.
The Notebook's data on this trend is consistent with what coaches up and down the division appear to be doing in practice: more bodies near the penalty spot, more layered short-corner routines, and fewer stations of the kind that used to populate Premier League technical areas. It is the kind of trend that, three months from now, will look obvious in retrospect. Right now, it is visible mostly in the data.
What the three trends have in common
Read together, the three trends point in the same direction. The Premier League in 2026-27 is becoming a more contested, more zone-aware competition, with less open space, more physical duels, and more structured set-pieces. That is not, on its face, a novel claim — it is, broadly, the direction the league has been moving for a decade. What the early data shows is that the specific mechanisms by which that direction expresses itself are shifting: the wide carry is becoming harder, the direct press is becoming more viable at promoted-side level, and the set-piece routine is being re-engineered from the delivery point inward.
For tactical analysts, the work over the next month will be to see whether these trends hold. Small samples in September are not the same as small samples in December. But the patterns The Athletic has identified are not just statistical noise — they are the early shape of a league that, once again, is being rebuilt from the back of the pitch forward.
