For more than a decade, we got used to the idea that elite wingers were supposed to be scorers first and everything else second. The inside-forward era trained our eyes. We watched Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, and Mohamed Salah operate from wide starting points while behaving like auxiliary strikers. Their touchline positioning was cosmetic. Their real territory was the half-space inside the box. What has changed is not finishing ability. It is instruction.
The game is now back to a state where the winger is no longer recruited primarily as a scorer. He is recruited as a wide specialist, someone whose first responsibility is to hold width, beat his man, stretch the last line, protect rest defense, and enable central dominance. Goals are now a bonus, not the mandate.
Take Bukayo Saka. His technical level has improved almost every season. His decision-making is sharper, his ball striking cleaner. Yet his scoring fluctuates, not because he is regressing, but because his role has expanded outward and backward. He is asked to receive wider, defend deeper, and recycle more often. The modern system values his reliability over his volume. That is the core of this shift. Wingers have not exactly lost talent. They have lost permission.
One of the most understated changes in modern football is how aggressively managers now pin wingers to the touchline. Width is no longer situational. It is permanent.
The diagonal run, once the signature of the inside-forward, has been deprioritized. The winger’s job is to stay wide long enough to force the opposition back line to stretch, even if that winger never becomes the final threat. You see this clearly with Jérémy Doku. He beats his full-back as well as almost anyone in Europe. Yet how often does he arrive centrally for the finish? Rarely. His job is to destabilize, not conclude. The shot is usually reserved for someone else.
The math supports this. If you begin your attacking action 15 yards wider, your angle into the box narrows. Your shooting lane collapses faster. Your expected goals per shot naturally drops. This is not inefficiency. It is geometry. The same applies to someone like Pedro Neto . His take-ons succeed. His penetration is real. But the end product is frequently a cut-back or a reset, because the system prefers control over chaos. The winger is not failing. He is obeying. Modern wingers are being used as spatial tools. Their presence matters more than their finish.
If the first constraint is width, the second is defense. This is where the modern winger quietly loses his edge as a scorer, not through lack of talent, but through accumulated fatigue. When we talk about wingers today, we often describe them as “hard-working” or “disciplined.” Those are compliments, but they come with a cost.
In most elite systems, the winger is now part of the first defensive line. Pressing triggers are drilled obsessively, the moment the opposition full-back opens his body, the winger must sprint, angle his run, and cut off the inside pass. This happens again and again. Forty, sometimes fifty high-intensity sprints per match, many of them without touching the ball. That matters.
Finishing is not just technique, it is timing, balance, and calm under stress. When a winger finally arrives in the box after 70 minutes of defensive work, his legs are heavier, his breathing is elevated, and his margin for error is thinner. A half-chance that might have been a clean strike five years ago becomes a dragged shot or a hesitation. You see this clearly with players like Vinicius Junior. His end product is still strong, but his role now includes tracking runners deep into his own half, protecting the left-back, and initiating the press. His goals do not disappear because his quality drops, they flatten because his energy is being spent earlier and elsewhere.
In many systems, especially those using a 3-2-2-3 or 2-3-5 in possession, the winger also becomes responsible for tracking the opposition wing-back. That is not a side task, it can consume 40 percent of the match. The winger becomes a shadow full-back out of possession, then is expected to instantly transform into a killer inside the box on transition. That cognitive and physical switch is harder than it looks.
There is also attentional fatigue. When a winger spends the game worrying about defensive spacing, denying switches, and protecting rest-defense, he loses some of the predatory instinct that once defined inside-forwards. Anticipation suffers. The half-second delay in attacking a rebound is often the difference between a goal and a clearance. The winger has not become worse at finishing. He simply arrives to finishing moments in a worse-conditioned state.
The decline in winger scoring also becomes less of a mystery if you look at where modern teams design their attacks to end. The kill zone has been centralized. Modern attacking structures are designed to centralize danger. Clubs are no longer satisfied with “good chances.” They want the best chances, and data has made one thing brutally clear, the highest-value shots come from central zones inside the box. Everything else is secondary.
This is where the something I’d like to call the “Haaland Effect” matters, even beyond Erling Haaland himself. When you build a team around a dominant central finisher, you do not just add goals, you reshape the pitch. Attacks are funneled inward. Crosses become cut-backs. Wide penetration becomes a means, not an end. As a result, the winger’s historic territory, that diagonal run into the box, is crowded out. The central striker occupies both center-backs. The opposite winger is often holding width. The late runners are midfielders like Jude Bellingham, whose job is now to arrive unseen into the “second wave” of the box. The winger supplies the ball, then watches someone else finish.
This is why players like Phil Foden or Cole Palmer often score more when they drift inside or play as hybrid midfielders rather than fixed wide attackers. The system rewards central timing, not wide volume.
The cut-back culture reinforces this shift. Modern goals are increasingly scored from passes pulled back from the byline into the penalty spot or six-yard line. The winger reaches the byline, but the finish belongs to someone else. The architect is rarely the executioner. Players like Vinícius Júnior still post strong numbers, but even they are more selective. Their shot maps are narrower than those of classic inside-forwards. They are deadly, but only when given license to step into central lanes, not when pinned wide.
