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About four times a game, most football teams do a small, dumb thing.

An opponent kicks the ball out of bounds in their defensive quarter, adjacent to their own penalty area. The attacking side gets the ball back on the touchline.

They’re barely 15 yards away from the other team’s box. The laws of the game say they can use their hands to throw it anywhere they want.

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But most of the time, it turns out that where the attacking team throws the ball when they’re near the penalty area is… not into the penalty area. This is, respectfully, a bad choice.

Just. Throw. The. Ball… into the box.

A throw-in into the penalty area is more likely to lead to a goal — not just right away but over the next 30 seconds. That’s more than enough time for your more sophisticated possession teams to take a short throw, pass it around and try to create some other, prettier kind of chance.

By the numbers, short throws still come up short. You may not like it aesthetically but big fat hurls into the box are just better. It’s not even close.

Over the last four Premier League seasons, short throw-ins from the final quarter of the pitch are worth an average of 0.010 expected goals over the next 30 seconds, meaning they should produce 10 goals for every 1,000 throws. Throws into the box are worth more than double that, at 0.022 xG per attempt.

Worried about counter-attacks from long throws? Don’t be. Taken short, a throw-in in the final quarter of the pitch will lead to a goal for the non-throwing team in the next 30 seconds just two out of every 1,000 times. Throw it into the box and that rises to three out of every 1,000. The extra risk from throws into the box is an order of magnitude smaller than the reward.

Across leagues, levels and seasons, the numbers vary a little bit but the rule of thumb stays the same: a throw into the box is about twice as valuable as one taken short from the same part of the pitch. Long throws double your fun.

The remarkable thing about those league averages is that it’s not the best teams that are doing most of the long throws into the box. It’s teams like Brentford, who rank eighth in the Premier League for total non-penalty expected goals per game but who have been comfortably top of the league for two seasons running for the expected goal value of their attacking throw-ins.

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What’s their secret? Simple. They throw the ball into the box.

Brentford’s owner, Matthew Benham, is a professional gambler who made his fortune searching for small advantages. When he started investing in football clubs, he found that one of the cheapest ways for a team to boost its goal difference was to squeeze maximum value out of dead-ball routines.

First, at his Danish club Midtjylland, then at Brentford, Benham’s teams fought their way up the table thanks in part to goals from set pieces, including long throw-ins.

You can see that training in a goal that Brentford scored from a throw-in against West Ham in December:

Mathias Jensen takes a running start to launch a throw all the way to the edge of the six-yard box. Brentford centre-back Ethan Pinnock, taking advantage of the rule that you can’t be offside from a throw-in, runs backward onto the ball from the byline and flicks a header away from goal, over West Ham’s retreating back line, to where Christian Norgaard’s trailing run has left him in space to shoot.

It’s a perfect routine. The fact that it doesn’t entirely work, and that it’s Ivan Toney who winds up scoring from a rebound, only hammers home why throwing the ball into the box is a good idea. You don’t do it in the hope that everything will go right. You deliver the ball close to the goal, where bodies get tangled and the ball bounces unexpectedly. and cross your fingers that something goes wrong… or, more accurately, right.

On average, less than half of the xG from long throw-ins comes in the five seconds after the throw (in the Premier League, throws into the box earn just 0.008 xG in the first five seconds compared to 0.022 xG over 30 seconds). The real value is in rebounds, loose balls and second-wave attacks while the defence is still rattled.

In order to create that disorganisation, you need a player who can get the ball in the box in the first place. One reason teams don’t take more long throws is the sheer physical difficulty of hurling a ball that far.

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Not every squad is blessed with a Rory Delap and 40-yard throw-ins are probably too specialised a skill to be worth recruiting for.

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“It’s much, much better to take a player who’s already good and then develop his throw-in technique,” says the throw-in coach Thomas Gronnemark, who has worked with Midtjylland and Brentford. “I’m not only coaching throw-in tactics, I’m also coaching technique.” He says simple technical adjustments can improve most throwers’ range by five to 15 metres, enough to get the ball into a dangerous area.

Another reason some clubs don’t throw the ball into the box is that they don’t think they have the target men to score from them. It’s not clear how much that really matters, given the importance of rebounds and second waves, but it can become sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy when teams that wouldn’t think twice about putting corner kicks into the box for the same forwards simply choose not to throw to them.

The upshot is that a lot of teams don’t attempt enough throws into the box to know for sure how much it might help them. “It’s not a bad idea for anyone and it’s a good idea for a chunk of teams,” the data scientist Mike Imburgio says. “Not enough clubs try new things.”

Overall, though, the advantage is clear. Using a mixed-effects model to adjust for team effects, the real expected goal value of an attacking throw-in outside the box in the Premier League this season is about 0.008 xGD in the 30 seconds after the throw. The model estimates that a throw into the box adds another 0.008 xGD — right in line with the “box throws double your fun” rule of thumb.

It’s a small edge for a kind of play that doesn’t happen that much in the first place. If your average Premier League club put every single one of its 180 attacking throws over the course of a season into the box, it could expect to earn just a 1.44 goal advantage over, say, Wolves (who haven’t thrown a single throw into the box this season).

But in a league where a one-point difference can be worth millions, a goal and a half isn’t nothing. It’s a simple tactical choice. It’s free. All you have to lose is your dignity.

So go ahead, take a running start, and throw the ball into the damn box.

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