The first goal of the season, and the one that restarted Manchester City’s title defense, came from a pullback.
And so did the most recent one that might decide the title race, when Kai Havertz on Sunday dribbled toward the end line and then — as the name suggests — pulled the ball back for Leandro Trossard in front of the net, creating Arsenal’s winning goal over Manchester United.
Goals are way up in the Premier League this season, and uncoincidentally, so is perhaps the single most dangerous pass in the sport:
the driven ball from near the end line, against the defense’s momentum, back toward the penalty spot. The pullback — also called a cutback — is driving Arsenal’s title challenge.
It’s also why Manchester City kept winning the league, but might not this year.
While the pullback was once the province of only the richest teams in any given league around the world, like Lionel Messi’s Barcelona, it has been spreading.
The maneuver that has long been used to great effect in Spain is now trendier than ever before across the Premier League, where just about every team has developed an obsession with it.
No matter what the table looks like at the end of next weekend, the pullback has become the pass that defines the Premier League.
Lessons from Messi, and why the pullback worksAt the highest level of the sport, the pullback was popularized by Barcelona at the beginning of the last decade.
The platonic ideal featured a diagonal through-ball from Lionel Messi to an overlapping Jordi Alba, who then played a pullback toward the penalty area for an onrushing Messi to finish off the pass.
Since 2010, there have been seven seasons across Europe’s big five leagues in which a team scored at least eight goals from pullbacks — and four of them came from the dominant Barcelona teams featuring Messi and Alba.
Over that same stretch, Alba registered 18 assists from pullbacks, while no other player has created more than 10. And Messi scored 24 goals from pullbacks — nobody else has more than 16.
As this graphic with all of Alba’s LaLiga assists to Messi shows, most of them came from passes inside the box that are then played away from the goal:
And therein lies the key to the pullback’s effectiveness. Defenders, instinctively, are defending the goal — especially when the ball gets so close to the goal.
To defend the goal, you drop closer to the goal. But a pullback essentially uses traditional defender instincts to destroy a defense.
Messi is the best at pretty much everything, but a classic 2014 paper showed he was also the best at walking.
It’s not that he’s lazy — though it is an energy conservation technique as well — but rather it’s that most soccer players are taught to be in a constant state of movement, which leads them to vacate high-value areas on the field as they chase after an opponent or the ball.
While Messi can brilliantly create space for himself with the ball, when he’s out of possession, he’ll let the opposition create the space for him and then just stand there.
This is exactly what happens with a pullback. As the attacking team drives the ball toward the end line, the defenders naturally scramble back toward their goal line, which creates seams inside the most valuable area of the field:
the penalty box. A manager with Champions League experience told me his teams train for these specific moments, and he credits Pep Guardiola for popularizing the tactic.
“The finisher is within the penalty area — usually between 12 yards out and goal — the goalkeeper is recovering to the center of the goal or is out of the equation entirely, and the defenders are forced to face their own goal,” said Carlon Carpenter, head of video analysis with the Houston Dynamo.
“So even if the pass fails, errors can occur on their end or lead to corners and regains for the attacking team.”
Carpenter is something like the Internet’s preeminent scholar of pullbacks (or “cutbacks,” as he calls them).
In 2021, he co-authored a series called “Where Goals Come From” with analyst Jamon Moore for the website American Soccer Analysis. They found (among other things) that shots from pullbacks had the second-highest conversion rate of any pass, behind only through-balls:
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