L ast Sunday, when the Arsenal defender Sokratis Papastathopoulos attempted to pass the ball from inside his own penalty area to Mattéo Guendouzi just outside it and in doing so gifted Watford a goal that allowed them back into the game, he joined a recent trend. Everybody wants to play out from the back, but in the past few months doing so has proved exceptionally risky: John Stones against the Netherlands, Plamen Iliev for Bulgaria against England, Michael Keane against Kosovo, Nicolás Otamendi against Norwich – the list of those who have given goals away trying to build from deep grows by the week.

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Arsenal had looked suspect long before Tom Cleverley’s goal but didn’t amend their approach. They were playing it out from the back in Frankfurt on Thursday and presumably will do again against Aston Villa on Sunday afternoon. That’s the way they play, no matter the danger.

And it’s not just them. So why are so many sides obsessed with playing it short from the back, and why has doing so apparently become more risky recently?

Occasionally external forces – law changes, developments in sports science, the theories of an unorthodox genius – can yank evolution off in an unexpected direction, but development in football tactics tends to follow a fairly straightforward model.

A coach has an idea and for a while it works. It becomes more common as others see the advantages it provides and copy it, but as they do so, opponents begin to work out ways of combating it. Then, either some sort of equilibrium is reached, or there is a reaction to the reaction and the cycle moves on to another turn.

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For a team that are more technically adept than their opponents, passing the ball out from the back has always made sense. Football may have begun as a territorial game but once it becomes more about possession the logical thing to do is to protect that rather than lump the ball forward and hope your striker wins the knockdown or that the bounce falls your way.

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Through the 70s and 80s, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest had a preference for possession football built from the back. And while the two clubs faced hugely significant and very different off-field issues, at least part of the reason for their decline in the 90s was the introduction of the back‑pass law in 1992, which meant defenders receiving the ball deep no longer had the safety net of being able to roll it back for their keeper to pick up.

At Ajax and Barcelona, Johan Cruyff, who opposed the back-pass law for fear it would make passing out from the back too risky, took the idea further, encouraging his goalkeeper to advance from his penalty area to act as an auxiliary outfielder. Keepers, he said, had a fear of being lobbed because it made them look stupid but it was worth the risk because, although it might cost his side a goal or two a season, the net gain of being able to control possession outweighed that.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Victor Valdés was always comfortable with the ball at his feet. Photograph: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

That seems a vital point: there is an aversion to certain mistakes because they are apparent to everybody or because they defy one of the age-old conventions of the sport. But just because everybody can identify them doesn’t necessarily make them more costly than other less obvious errors.

The current vogue for playing out from the back began at Barcelona under Pep Guardiola. It did occasionally get his side into difficulty. In December 2011, for instance, Karim Benzema scored the earliest goal in clásico history after Víctor Valdés played a pass straight to Ángel Di María. But Valdés was undaunted.

The next time the ball came to him, he rolled it calmly to Gerard Piqué about five yards from the goalline. Barça had faith in their method, accepted there would be blips and went on to win 3-1.

For those sides good enough to do it, passing out from the back offers control. They have the ball and with it they can dictate the tempo. Draw an opponent into trying to win it back recklessly and immediately they are stretched or out of shape, a player or two taken out of the game far from their own goal. And so for a long time opponents tended to sit off.

What has happened recently is that teams without the ball have been emboldened. And really, why wouldn’t they be? Clubs spend hours researching the patterns of opponents – those patterns are much easier to track when you know the starting point: the goalkeeper.

With a small handful of notable exceptions, which players are likely to be less adept on the ball, less capable of spinning away from a challenger or laying off a clever pass under pressure: central defenders and goalkeepers, or midfielders?

In that sense, it feels slightly strange that it is only recently that teams have begun targeting that area with their press. It may be that the change in the law that means a goal-kick no longer has to leave the penalty area before another player can touch it has encouraged sides; previously a defender anticipating pressure could simply have stepped inside the area as the pass came towards him and so forced the goal-kick to be retaken.

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The approach isn’t entirely new. At the Etihad in December 2017, for example, Tottenham tried to block in Manchester City by pushing up on their full-backs at goal-kicks, only to find Ederson bypassing their press with a series of accurate long passes. City won 4-1.

It may be that teams begin to attempt to play over the press: Leicester have begun trying to use Jamie Vardy’s pace to get on to long clearances from Kasper Schmeichel. Old-school target men will in time perhaps come back into fashion for their ability to offer an outlet.

For now, though, teams such as Arsenal have a dilemma. They have adopted a strategy in which risk is inherent, but are the errors an inevitable part of the process or are they symptomatic of a problematic trend?