Goals from free-kicks and from outside the box are up, David Raya says there’s a difference, keepers are struggling and Dominik Szoboszlai keeps scoring worldies. So do the experts think this season’s Puma ball is the reason?

Gianluigi Donnarumma barely moved. One moment the ball was flying towards him, the next it thuds off the inside of his left post and into the net. Dominik Szoboszlai had done it again.

Another spinning, swerving free-kick scored by the Liverpool midfielder, his third of the season, another long-range screamer added to an ever-growing Premier League tally and another stunner chalked up for the new Puma ball brought in this term after 25 years using a Nike one.

Erling Haaland’s strike against Fulham last week was the 100th goal from outside the box of the campaign so far. They are whistling in more often than in any season since 2013-14. Aston Villa, especially Morgan Rogers, are banging them in off the lampshades.

We’ve already seen more goals from direct free-kicks this season than in each of the last two campaigns and there’s still 120 games to go. Anton Stach sent a peach dipping so sharply under the bar for Leeds against Crystal Palace that it hit the net nearly halfway up. Reece James’s against Newcastle almost found the bottom corner.

Is it the ball? It was Puma’s Carabao Cup one, after all, that Mikel Arteta claimed ‘flies differently’ after his Arsenal side blazed tons of shots over the bar in their semi-final first leg defeat to Newcastle last January.

Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya also had something to say about the new Premier League one when he was the man between the sticks as Szoboszlai curled in another brilliant free-kick in Liverpool’s victory over the Gunners earlier in the season.

Szoboszlai is congratulated by his Liverpool team-mates for his wonder strike 

‘It’s a very good strike, especially with the new balls and everything,’ said Raya. ‘We still have to adapt. It’s going away from me so it’s harder to gauge and save it. It’s different to the Nike ball so we have to adapt. The grip is different, the kick is different. We just have to adapt after playing with the Nike ball for many years. It’s the same for everybody.’

Managers and players are always mocked when they dare blame the ball. Pep Guardiola slammed Mitre’s FA Cup one last season after City came from behind to beat Plymouth. ‘The ball in the Champions League is exceptional, the ball in the Premier League is exceptional, this one isn’t,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to control. The ball is not right. It’s the truth.’

One thing is clear, though: goalkeepers are finding it more difficult to keep long-range shots out of the net in the first season since moving to the Puma ball.

Opta data says goalkeepers have prevented 15 goals this season based on the quality of shots they have faced from outside the box when it was nearly 40 in each of the last two campaigns. Their overall save percentage from such attempts is at its lowest in at least the last 12 seasons at 81 per cent while the shot conversion rate from range of nearly five per cent is the highest since Opta’s records began in 2006-07.

It is too simplistic, of course, to say it’s all down to the ball. The game has changed as much as the ball has. The dominance of low blocks has led to some teams to decide they are best off defying the laws of xG and shooting from further out rather than repeatedly trying – and failing – to pass it through crowded penalty areas. But the stats paint a picture.

‘The ball is quicker than in previous years,’ one goalkeeping coach at a Premier League club tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘That’s the feel of it anyway. When it’s struck true and straight, it can travel a lot further and quicker and when you [go to] catch it off, it will veer off more.

‘From the start of the season when we changed it over there was definitely a case of having to pick up the speed of it quicker.’

The head of performance at another Premier League club, however, tells Daily Mail Sport they were initially worried the new Puma ball would play up like the ‘really swervy’ Carabao Cup one but were relieved when it showed no real differences to its old Nike counterpart so haven’t had to change their training to compensate.

Szoboszlai scores a similar goal earlier in the season against Arsenal at Anfield

David Raya belives the new Puma ball is ‘different to the Nike ball so we have to adapt. The grip is different, the kick is different. We just have to adapt after playing with the Nike ball for many years,’ he says 

There are few people better placed to answer the question for certain than Ieuan Phillips, research associate at the Sports Technology Institute at Loughborough University.

The institute works with leading sports equipment manufacturers to design, make and test everything from golf clubs to cricket helmets. Ping are based in the building behind them. The ECB are on campus, too, and put the safety of their gear to the test in the labs.

They also test footballs. The do a lot of work with Adidas and a massive wind tunnel over the road is currently testing the World Cup ball ahead of the summer. Phillips recently finished his own PhD focused on, you guessed it, testing footballs.

Phillips has tested Puma balls, Nike balls, Mitre balls, Adidas balls. You name it, he’s tested them. Humans kick them first and a high-speed camera records at 1,000 frames a second so they can analyse power and spin. Then they get their robot to do it: a mechanical arm, weighing nearly two-thirds of a tonne, with a boot attached to it. There are, so Phillips says, only three of them in the world and Nike and Adidas have the other two. While humans, however skilled, will never quite kick the ball the same way twice, robots can repeat exactly the same strike over and over and over again.

Phillips is a Liverpool fan so, naturally, has rewatched Szoboszlai’s stunner ‘about a million times’. From his experience of testing both Puma and Nike balls, though, how much of a difference does the new ball make?

‘Broadly, a football is a football,’ Phillips tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘It doesn’t change an awful lot and that’s by design.’

FIFA’s ‘Quality Programme for Footballs’ dictates that all balls must be a certain shape, size, weight, pressure and so on with room for about a 10 per cent leeway.

‘Nevertheless, you do see subtle differences,’ adds Phillips. ‘Every football is different because it’s made with different materials, with different number of panels, using different construction methods.’

Puma’s current Orbita Ultimate PL ball has 12 panels which are ‘thermally bonded’

We’ve seen more goals from direct free-kicks this season than in each of the last two campaigns and there’s still 120 games to go. Anton Stach sent a peach dipping sharply under the bar for Leeds against Crystal Palace

Puma’s current Orbita Ultimate PL ball has 12 panels, which are ‘thermally bonded’, which means the panels are adhered directly to the bladder using heat to form a fully-bonded shell. The Nike Flight, the previous top-flight ball, only had four panels with deep grooves and they were ‘fuse-welded’, where the outer edges of the panels were fused together to encase the bladder. Neither require stitching like the old days but are still slightly different.

‘So, there are subtle differences but within a fairly narrow scope,’ adds Phillips. ‘The surface texture of the ball will be different, the way the ball deforms on the foot will be slightly different as a result of the materials and the construction. All of these factors will affect, subtly, the way a player perceives the ball on their foot, the way it grips. It’s very difficult to measure those things.’

It’s hard to quantify feel. Cricket balls are all roughly the same size and shape but Jimmy Anderson will like how one sits in the hand more than another. The Premier League goalkeeping coach did not have the data to back up their claim that the ball moved quicker, but it just felt like it. Even different colours of a ball can make a difference to how quick it feels.

Crucially, though, do those subtle differences make the ball, as Arteta put it, ‘fly differently’. ‘There is no evidence to support that,’ insists Phillips.

What about Szobozlai’s free-kick, then? Would that still have swerved away from Donnarumma if it were the Nike ball at his feet?

‘It is very, very difficult to say for sure,’ says Phillips. ‘He’s got an unbelievable technique and changes that technique depending on the scenario, even in different competitions with different balls.’

That’s why, so Phillips’ colleague Andy Harland previously told The Athletic, Diego Forlan had such success at the 2010 World Cup with the wildly unpredictable Adidas Jabulani ball because he struck it with his laces at altitude because the ball flies faster due to the reduced air resistance and curled with his instep at sea level because the change in atmosphere was more conducive to spin.

‘The main effect, really, is how the player kicks it,’ says Phillips. ‘The variation in how a player kicks the ball far exceeds the differences between the balls themselves.

‘For all of the engineering that goes into a football, the outcome when we put it on a test like we do for kick, speed, spin, shows that footballs are all quite similar,’ says Ieuan Phillips, research associate at the Sports Technology Institute at Loughborough University.

Pep Guardiola slammed Mitre’s FA Cup ball last season after Manchester City came from behind to beat Plymouth

‘The speed, the angle, the spin, the axis of that spin is what took it away from Donnarumma. It was just beautiful, wasn’t it? The characteristics of the way the ball comes off the foot may differ subtly, but I wouldn’t have thought it has an impact on whether the goal is scored or not.

‘For all of the engineering that goes into a football, the outcome when we put it on a test like we do for kick, speed, spin, whatever, shows that footballs, ultimately, are all quite similar.

‘The question of whether the free-kick would have gone in with a Nike ball is very difficult to say for certain but there’s nothing to suggest that it wouldn’t have done. I just think it’s an unbelievable free-kick.’

So, maybe it isn’t the ball after all. Maybe it’s just down the person booting it.