Unknotting his hair and turning his face towards the camera, Dominik Szoboszlai winked and snapped his fingers. As though gesturing the free-kick was the simplest piece of job he had to perform the entire night, as though he pulls the trick every other match-week. It was not.
The complexities involved were several. The ball was 32 yards from the goal. The wall was assembled with meticulous detail. All angles blanketed; all routes closed. Guarding the fort was David Raya, the safest keeper in the league. Screening him is the most well-drilled free-kick repellent unit. To beat them all required staggering brilliance. The Hungarian conjured the staggeringly brilliant. He sweet-spotted a shot with sting, curl and dip. He bent it over the wall, leaping towards futility and swung the ball with unreal power to beat a petrified Raya. The Spaniard stood with his mouth agape, before he shrugged his head in helplessness.
The goal was pure gold, turned more golden when it turned out to be the decider. Later, Szoboszlai with his typical underselling nature, sounded all too casual. “I thought I would take the risk, I was confident in myself and tried it. As you know Trent Alexander-Arnold was taking the free kicks because he had an unbelievable shot. Finally I could have my turn,” he said.
Sit back and enjoy every angle of THAT Dominik Szoboszlai free-kick 😮💨 pic.twitter.com/XadhY8wuB9
— Premier League (@premierleague) August 31, 2025
But once he stood behind the ball, after a brief conversation with Mo Salah and Cody Gakpo, he quickly measured the angles. A good free-kick is both art and maths. A bit of homework too. “This shot, I didn’t practice in the last few weeks because we were shooting from closer. I had to take the risk and shoot it a little bit harder because I knew (David) Raya likes to jump one side across the goal and is an unbelievable goalkeeper. If it’s a little bit more inside he saves it,” he explained the rationale.
Free-kick artists are both nerds and prophets. Their eyes trace paths that no one sees, their mind reads the angles with invisible protractors. They have a dissection manual of the goalkeepers they are about to shock. They perpetually look for new tricks, fresh slices of improvisation, and share secrets and tips with their brethren. They walk with an aura, the pride of a rare gift they have. To breathe life into a dead ball. Szoboszlai is not yet an artiste, even though his thunderbolt was a piece of art.
But the strike could resuscitate the dying art of a direct free-kick. With every passing year, teams in the Premier League, as well as world over, are resorting to the safer alternative of pinging the ball into the box, finding the head, or a ricochet, or a deflection. It has a better conversion rate that a direct attempt. According to Opta Stats, just one in every 20 direct attempts is converted, that is a mere five percent. So possession-centric teams are more inclined to shun the direct route.
Consequently, the Premier League has witnessed a steady decline in the last decade. From 384 in the 2018-19 season, it slumped to 283 last season. The conversion rate dropped from 6.49 percent to 3.88 last year. Last year, for instance, Liverpool did not have a single direct attempt, despite possessing one of the finest in Trent. Ironically, teams put a lot of emphasis on set-pieces but not on direct free kicks. Arsenal, for example, had not scored a single such goal since Martin Odegaard deposited one into the top corner in a 1-0 win at Burnley in September 2021. They have, though, in Europe. Like Declan Rice against Real Madrid last season.
Their superior aerial threat is a prime reason, but as is the increasing perception that it’s not a risk worth taking. Szoboszlai’s goal was Liverpool’s fourth in five seasons (70 attempts). League football is maddeningly intolerant to wastage. Free kicks are an inevitable casualty.
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The immediate ripple effect is that free-kick specialists have become endangered. In the 90s and 2000s, every team had a host of them. The master of all, the Brazilian Juninho Pernambucano (77 goals, the leader), who made sensational free-kicks a matter of routine and struck from all possible angles, distance and parts of feet, his disciple Andrea Pirlo, or his senior compatriot Gianfranco Zola. Or David Beckham, or before that Zico. The latter would hang a shirt in each top corner and challenge himself to take one of them down from 20 yards every single day. Later, it became one of the several strings in the bow of a great player. Like it is to Lionel Messi (69 off 456 tries, exemplifying the art’s difficulty) and Cristiano Ronaldo (64 off 492). Or the less celebrated ones like Didi, who invented the folha seca (dry leaf), that swung like a banana, or Blackpool’s cult hero Sinisa Mihajlovic, who had a devilish curler from outside the boot.
In this era, there are just a handful of them. Like James Ward-Prowse, now loaned out to Nottingham Forest by West Ham United. The 30-year-old is a lone strike away from equalling Beckham’s PL high of 18 goals and has already raced ahead of legends such as Zola and Thierry Henry. Szoboszlai’s wonder strike belongs to the realm of virtuosos. But when he gets his next pop has to be seen, which gives more reasons to celebrate his strike against Arsenal.
