A typical team takes somewhere between 30 and 45 throw-ins in a match. Compare that to corners — maybe five or six — and free kicks in dangerous areas, maybe three. By volume, the throw-in is by an enormous margin the most common set piece in football.

It's also the one almost nobody trains. I'd guess the average professional side spends more minutes per week on corner routines than on throw-ins, despite taking eight times as many throws. That's a strange allocation of attention and it's slowly starting to change, but not fast.

The default is genuinely bad

Watch what happens on a standard throw-in in the middle third. The full-back picks up the ball. Two teammates make short movements towards him. He throws it to one of them, who is facing his own goal with an opponent on his back, roughly two yards from the touchline.

The receiver then either loses it, gets fouled, or plays it backwards. Possession retention from throw-ins in the middle third is genuinely poor across most leagues — I've seen figures in the region of 50 to 60% for teams that don't work on it, which is dreadful compared to open play retention of 80% plus.

Think about what's happening structurally. You have voluntarily given the ball to a player who is against a touchline, facing the wrong way, with no ability to move backwards. It's the worst receiving position on the pitch and we hand it to somebody four dozen times a match.

Why it's so hard

To be fair to everyone, there are real constraints that make throw-ins awkward.

The thrower is out of play, so you're effectively 10v11 for the duration. The ball can't be thrown forward past a defender easily because it travels slowly through the air and can be read. There's no offside from a throw, which sounds like an advantage but mostly means defenders can drop deep with impunity. And the touchline removes an entire direction of movement.

So the difficulty is genuine. But difficulty is an argument for coaching something, not for ignoring it.

What the good ones do

The methods that seem to work fall into a few groups.

Create separation before the throw, not after. The single biggest improvement available. Instead of players jogging vaguely towards the thrower, the receiver makes a hard movement in one direction — usually towards the ball — and then reverses it. Two yards of separation is all you need, and a stationary receiver never gets it.

Throw backwards on purpose. Counterintuitive and very effective. A throw back to a centre-back or holding midfielder who's facing forward retains possession at near 100% and lets you restart properly. Teams treat backward throws as failures when they're often the correct answer.

Use the third man. Throw to a player whose only job is to head or flick it first time to somebody arriving. The receiver never has to control anything under pressure. This is how the long-throw specialists effectively operate in general play as well, and it's underrated.

Overload one side. Bring four or five players into a tight area near the throw. It looks crowded and pointless. What it does is drag defenders into that area, and then one quick combination or a switch out to the far side finds a completely open pitch. The clustering is bait.

Take it fast. The most obvious and most ignored. A throw taken within three seconds of the ball going out is often taken against a defence that hasn't reorganised. Every second you spend picking up the ball and looking around is a second the opposition uses to get set.

The attacking-third throw

Separate case, and this is where the biggest gains sit.

A throw-in level with the penalty area is a genuine goalscoring opportunity and most teams treat it as a restart. The reason it's dangerous is that defending teams don't set up for throws the way they set up for corners — the marking is looser, the organisation is improvised, and there's no offside to protect them.

A long throw into the box is the crude version, and there's a reason certain sides have made careers out of it. The more sophisticated version is a rehearsed short routine designed to get a cross in from the byline against a defence that hasn't set. Two or three passes, none of them difficult, and suddenly you're delivering from a position that would normally require beating a full-back.

The reason more teams don't do this is, I suspect, mostly cultural. Long throws look agricultural. A team that scores from one gets described as direct or limited, even though the goal counts the same. That's an aesthetic prejudice costing people points.

The defensive side

Worth flipping it round, since the same logic applies.

Defending throw-ins well is mostly about denying the easy backward option and pressing the receiver from behind rather than in front. If your defender sits in front of the receiver, the receiver can shield and lay it off. If your defender is tight to his back and the throw arrives, either you win it or he has to take an awkward touch under contact.

It's aggressive and it does concede fouls occasionally. But throw-ins in your own half are one of the highest-value pressing opportunities available — the opposition are momentarily a man short and stuck against a line. A team that consistently wins the ball from opposition throws in the middle third generates a lot of attacks from very good positions.

None of this is complicated. It's just unglamorous, and it competes for training time with things that feel more important. I'd argue that a team spending twenty minutes a week on throw-ins would see a bigger return than the same twenty minutes on almost anything else, purely because of the volume. Forty repetitions a match is a lot of chances to be slightly better than the other lot.