Gary Neville branded modern players ‘robots’ – now our experts set out how they would unleash mavericks and ditch stats to make the Premier League great again

Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville reckons the game is full of robots, boring and in need of a reboot because its participants are programmed to take no risks.

Those comments came after a Manchester derby so cosy that Neville suggested the two sets of players may as well go and share a Sunday roast together.

So, does he have a point? Mail Sport consulted our resident experts to see how football can be fixed, saved and restored to former glories — if indeed it needs saving at all. Spoiler alert: strong views incoming.

Our experts here at Mail Sport have weighed in on what needs to be done to make the Premier League great again 

DANNY MURPHY: I’ve seen some brilliant games this season but Gary Neville is right. The football has been a bit more robotic overall with less quality.

There is more than one reason for that. Coaches and managers — and us in the media, too — shouldn’t flood players with numbers and statistics. Even at academy level, players are now talked through their running stats and pass completion, rather than being judged on how they impacted a match. I’d have told myself off if my pass completion went above 75 per cent because it meant I wasn’t taking enough risks with the ball to try to be creative.

We’ve still got players who would think like that — game-changers like Cole Palmer and Bruno Fernandes — but there aren’t enough of them.

MARTIN KEOWN: Perhaps the biggest disease in our game is fear. Maybe that’s magnified even more by being at a huge club. The top managers take that fear away. They give their players a feeling of freedom and expression.

The best I have seen do this is Arsene Wenger. He gave his players trust, belief and knowledge. We would regularly do run-throughs of patterns of play, each player given three alternatives to play the ball. But the key thing is he would say: ‘For tomorrow’s game, you have the pleasure to decide what to do. That is your moment, your joy. You decide. I trust you to choose the right pass.’

MURPHY: I had it similar when I played at Fulham under Roy Hodgson. He was happy to give the players a degree of autonomy if they felt during a match they needed a change in approach. I’m not sure that is as readily allowed these days. The obsession with shape and tactics is damaging the entertainment.

CHRIS SUTTON: Sorry, chaps, but this is knee-jerk nonsense. Because we had one mundane match between a rudderless Manchester United and an apathetic Manchester City, football is broken and in crisis, is it? The game exists beyond those two under-performing behemoths.

Ask the 300,000 Newcastle fans who swarmed their streets if they think this season has been boring. Ask Nottingham Forest. Ask Liverpool. It isn’t Arne Slot’s fault there’s no jeopardy in the title race. None of those teams have played with fear, Martin, or Brighton or Bournemouth.

Sure, there is the odd tweak which could make our matches more enjoyable, and that’s mainly to do with VAR forever finding ways to stain games, but come on, let’s not get blinded by one 0-0 draw. We still see creativity in abundance. We don’t need to be pinning up ‘Wanted: Individuality’ posters at Premier League stadiums just yet. It’s fine as it is.

Tactical rigidity, fear and the abandonment of individual brilliance is a disease of our game

However, teams like Newcastle play with a dynamism which offers hope that football can be saved

MURPHY: But Chris, I think back to when I faced risk-takers like Gareth Bale, Eden Hazard, Luis Suarez, Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney, David Ginola, Jay-Jay Okocha. If those types of players aren’t encouraged, the games will automatically become staler. Modern recruitment departments base signings on their durability, athleticism and physicality.

SUTTON: Is Bukayo Saka not a risk-taker? Is Jeremy Doku not? Is Kaoru Mitoma not? Is Cole Palmer not? I could go on. I didn’t realise Kevin De Bruyne played with shackles on and wasn’t allowed to think for himself. That’s news to me, if so. You mention durability, athleticism and physicality as the desired attributes, but most clubs I know prioritise vision, awareness, technique, skill and character when searching for signings.

MURPHY: Big bucks are spent on centre halves and holding midfielders — that would never have been the case a few years ago. In contrast, the number of strikers in each squad is bizarrely small. United have only one genuine No 9 in Rasmus Hojlund, as do City in Erling Haaland and Chelsea in Nicolas Jackson. Arsenal don’t have any!

My Liverpool team had four: Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler, Emile Heskey and Jari Litmanen. As did United when they won the Treble. That’s how football is today. The priorities are different. For a team wanting to be competitive, they believe work rate should be regarded as more important than anything else, including technical skill.

KEOWN: United’s players look like they are on remote controls and haven’t yet found that freedom of expression. It is important for teams to have structure but you have to stop letting those structures strangle you.

It’s difficult not to feel uncertainty when you are constantly being told you’re in the wrong place. It takes a strong individual to break away and express themself. That’s perhaps what is happening with Fernandes. Watching City and United, everything was so safe and cautious.

SUTTON: Not so long ago, we were lauding Pep Guardiola as the greatest innovator to ever grace the Premier League. Now one drop-off and apparently he’s the problem as he’s over-coaching players and micromanaging them into characterless cyborgs. I find it remarkably reactionary after we watched City play a pedestrian derby with United.

We still see individualism in games, and there are different ways of winning, remember. It isn’t as if all 20 Premier League clubs play the same way. They have their tactical systems, and within them all, opportunities will crop up so that the creators can get to work.

Football changes and it goes through its little phases. But that does not mean what we’re seeing today is necessarily less exciting than any other eras we’ve lived through.

If teams are not encouraged to employ more risk-takers like Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney, games will continue to become staler

Pep Guardiola has been the target of backlash for his over-coaching of players

KEOWN: That Manchester bore draw aside, Chris is right that there are teams still putting on a show in the Premier League. Try telling supporters of Forest and Aston Villa they are watching robotic football while both teams enjoy a renaissance, returning to their glories of the 1980s.

Liverpool look anything but robotic under Slot — the last thing I saw that was robotic about Liverpool was Peter Crouch’s celebration!

Arsenal’s Declan Rice wasn’t robotic when he curled those two free-kicks around the Real Madrid wall. And Newcastle have won their first domestic trophy in 70 years playing a variety of ways tactically. We’ve got a mid-table group of teams in Fulham, Brighton, Bournemouth and Crystal Palace who are now able to join the party, all within touching distance of European football.

The key to this is they play with freedom. Forest play off instinct. They are happy to be without the ball for long periods but if you think that’s boring, I can’t help you. I don’t see boring at Everton. I see hope for the future. I see a structure under David Moyes but I see attacking freedom, too.

The fans of all these teams are seeing a quality of play and freedom of expression perhaps better than ever before. Their football is inspirational — certainly not boring.

Technology has made it easier for players to know where they should be and that can make play look choreographed at times — the key is that managers give structure but don’t take away the chance for individual expression by their players.

MURPHY: I’d like to see clubs judge players more on ability. Analysts probably check the tracking-back figures of a winger before the amount of chances he sets up. I’m not sure Cesc Fabregas, one of the most brilliant midfielders on the ball we’ve seen in the Premier League, would get in the current Arsenal team because he couldn’t press like Martin Odegaard or run like Thomas Partey. Mikel Arteta will point to the team’s success to justify his decisions, but as a spectacle the game will be poorer if there is no room for a future Fabregas.

KEOWN: In midweek, it wasn’t until Arsenal began to take risks in midfield and Myles Lewis-Skelly began to drive forward that he made the difference. He’s 18 years old but has been shown the maximum belief by his manager.

Pictured: a comparison of key stats between this season and the 2015-16 campaign

The obsession with shape and tactics in the modern game is damaging the entertainment, as we saw in last week’s Manchester derby

Arne Slot’s Liverpool have shown you do not need to be robotic to play entertaining football

MURPHY: The irony is that while managers want to flood their team with dynamic players, many of them also want to show they can play the Pep way. So in possession, they ask these super athletes to knock the ball about when that isn’t their strength, and better technical players are probably sitting on the bench! The result is a bit of a mishmash and not always pleasing on the eye.

Managers now feel they are judged on style as much as results. It worked out that way for Vincent Kompany, who got relegated at Burnley and was rewarded with the Bayern Munich job. They won’t depart from one philosophy. You’ve seen Ange Postecoglou and Enzo Maresca refuse to adapt this season and generally I feel players are given less freedom to express themselves than a decade ago.

SUTTON: I still think we get healthy doses of pizzazz in the Premier League. It isn’t boring and it isn’t broke, but I can see I’m struggling to get you out of Neville’s corner, Danny!

MURPHY: I’m not as pessimistic as Neville because we still have enough different styles in the Premier League to make it interesting, from Forest’s counter-attack to Bournemouth’s high-energy press. Fewer statistics and greater trust in technical players and strikers would get the ball rolling again in the right direction!