I haven't ever really followed the foreign leagues much. I never played soccer until I went on my mission, and then we only played microfutbol (different names in different places, but a small hard ball on a basketball-sized court and a lot of touch passing). I have, however, watched most of the USMNT tournament games in the last 15 years and their qualifiers.

Well, lately I have been going to watch a lot of highlight from foreign leagues. Of course, a lot of this has been mostly goal scoring, but I feel like I am seeing a trend in the last couple of year, but want to bounce this off of people who follow the sport more closely.

To preface this, the era of the Splash Brothers in basketball has changed how NBA teams and players view the 3 pointer. You see advanced metrics now that explain how 3PT percentages are equivalent or higher than a corresponding 2PT percentage. Well, it feels like distance shooting in soccer has been increasing a lot. It feels like even 10 years ago that cross and score or set pieces accounted for 90% of the goals, with distance shots always making highlight reels. However, it feels like in the last 2-3 years that long distance shots on goal have increased in frequency A LOT. Is it purely in my imagination?

I tried to go search the internet for something to support my (potentially very wrong) observation, but all I could find was some recent advanced metrics, the expected goals, xG, model that suggest that close goals are more likely (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/advanced-statistics-soccer-expected-goals-xg-model-klaas-stoker/). This still doesn't answer whether people are shooting more from further and whether the ability to set up a further goal and the likelihood ends up making it as efficient as the hard to set up close goals.

Any insights from the soccer fanatics on this sub would be greatly appreciated (and whether there is a FiveThirtyEight of soccer somewhere on the internet).