The Premier League’s 2025-26 season has become a circus of set-piece mayhem and garish jerseys, and frankly, the product is suffering for it. What was once a league built on fluid, end-to-end brilliance now too often devolves into a scrapheap of rehearsed corners, flick-ons, and commercial gimmickry masquerading as kit design. This isn’t a matter of personal taste—it’s a structural erosion of what makes football watchable.
Look at the numbers: set-piece goals now account for nearly 35% of all strikes in the Premier League, a figure that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Arsenal, under Mikel Arteta and set-piece coach Nicolas Jover, have turned every dead ball into a choreographed rugby maul, with Gabriel and Saliba wrestling opponents as Saka’s inswingers loop into a crowded six-yard box. Brentford’s long-throw routines and Aston Villa’s flicked corners have turned matches into stop-start scrums. The result? Games where the ball is in play for barely 50 minutes, where referees blow for fouls on goalkeepers that no one saw, and where the spontaneous beauty of a counter-attack gets smothered by a pre-planned aerial assault. Managers love the efficiency, but fans are left watching Igor’s shirt tugging instead of Odegaard’s through-balls. The game becomes ignorable—you can scroll your phone and still catch the next corner routine.
Then there are the kits. Nike’s latest designs for Chelsea—a migraine-inducing zigzag pattern that looks like a corrupted video file—and Manchester United’s gradient that fades into a muddy brown are not just ugly; they signal a league that values licensing novelty over identity. Everton’s salmon-pink away shirt and Tottenham’s ill-fitting geometric nonsense further strip clubs of their visual heritage. Fans don’t recognise their own players on the pitch. When Son Heung-min lines up in a shirt that makes him look like a retro arcade glitch, it breaks the emotional connection between supporter and team. This is not about aesthetic preference—it’s about the league commodifying its own soul. Every new kit launch is a cash grab disguised as creativity, and the product on screen suffers because players look like billboards rather than footballers.
If the 2025-26 season has taught us anything, it’s that the Premier League